We woke up around 7 and spent the first part of the morning reading; Jes her kindle, I my iPod, National Post app. When we started to feel the grumblings of hunger we went for a walk to source out some sustinence. We found a tiny, nameless cafe that served us ham and eggs with beans and fry jacks. Jes got hers in burrito form, and we split a super sweet-tasting coffee. I was so stuffed that I needed help finishing my fry jacks, and astoundingly, the whole meal cost us BZ$12, tip included! We wandered back to the hotel for more reading-in-the-hammock time before our 10:15 meeting time with the snorkel company.
The company we signed up with didn't have anyone else sign up for the trip, so we were scuttled over to their sister company, Tsunami, who had 6 going already. We jumped in the boat for a 45-minute, spine-jarring ride out the reef. The first stop was a bonus stop on top of the 3 we registered for; the captain spotted a fisherman and knew that there would be tons of ocean creatures beneath him. He was right. We donned our gear, rolled overboard and swam over to find hoards of fish, several great big rays and a huge turtle. I spent half the time at this stop madly fumbling through pictures from last summer's Manitoba trip as I had run out of digital memory on the card in my underwater camera. I managed to remove enough that I got some quality pictures and videos and I quickly changed out the card before we sped over to the next stop, Shark Ray Alley.
Despite it's name, there was a disappointing amount sharks and rays. I had signed up for this trip thinking there would be a frenzy of them swimming around wildly, flipping over onto my lap and waiting for belly rubs. There were so few in fact that I have zero pictures of sharks, forgoing the 3 or 4 photo ops I had in order to save memory space for the images I was expecting to capture. It didn't pan out that way and I had to settle for more boring fish and coral.
The next two stops were more of the same, with one noteworthy addition: an amputee sea turtle with a 3" stub where his front right flipper should have been. No sharks, no dolphins, no manatees, but lots of one thing: massive disappointment.
We went back to our breakfast place for a mid-afternoon snack. We ordered some panades, garnaches and salbutes (BZ$5.50) with some crazy spicy sauce and washed it all down with 4 beers and a couple coolers from a nearby store. Little did I know this was the beginning of gooning. We grabbed some more beer and ice for our rum and headed back to the hotel. I proceeded to polish off the remaining half bottle of One Barrel and by the end of the night I was plastered. At some point we went out for a bite at a little restaurant with a young guy singing and playing guitar. I liked the Red Hot Chili Peppers covers a lot.
Towards the end of the night Jes's backside was looking like the Austrian flag after spending the day face-down in the water (and bum-up in the sun) and she was starting to feel the pain. I immediately embarked on an aloe vera hunt. After my successful venture I returned to the hotel and played nerf football on the shared patio with the neighbors and their 7-year-old boy, Emelio. The game was suspended when we realized I had ripped the ends of my big toes off and was bleeding profusely all over the concrete patio. It looked like a blood-splattered war zone but fortunately my altered state was devoid of pain. I was so wrapped up in the nerf game I had kind of forgotten about Jes and her pink skin. I went inside to tend to the red menace and pass out.
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