I woke up earlier than I had to but but still got 12 hours of sleep! The dive center's car picked me up on time and within ten minutes of arriving at the store we were on our way to the boat. The boat is nothing special, a rather beat up old catamaran, but there's room for twenty or thirty divers and there are only eight. The first dive was at Guam's most famous site, The Blue Hole. The visibility was excellent - well over 140 feet! The dive itself was pretty good, though really it's what I call a drama dive - great scenery, but not much sea life. We started on top of a coral shelf about 60 feet deep looking at the top of the "hole" - a heart shaped vertical tunnel maybe 30 feet across. We dropped down along a wall to 130 feet to an arch leading in to the hole. Once in the hole the water was shimmering with an incredible blue light from the arch at the bottom and the the top - very beautiful, even though there's really nothing to see in the hole itself. From the top of the hole we ascended gradually along the coral shelf. We saw a couple eels and lion fish, but really not very much. I was very disappointed to see the dive master feeding the fish, kicking coral, harassing sealife, and digging into holes with a metal rod - not very eco friendly diving.
Back on the boat we had an hour out of the water - most of which we spent chasing down a small pod of spinner dolphins - it may have been a small pad, but they're the largest spinners I've ever seen. I was relieved to see that the captain stayed quite always away from them. The second dive was on the wreck known as the American Tanker. It's a large well preserved freighter sunk intentionally to be part of a breakwater. The visibility wasn't nearly as good, but it was nice as we got to swim through the wreck and it's very intact. Again it was a pretty good drama dive but not so good for the sea life. I was again really disappointed with one of the dive masters, though at least it wasn't ours - these guy carved his name into the growth on the wreck! The ride back to the island was pretty short, and mostly spent eating the provided box lunch. Back at the shop I spent a couple hours talking with the owner and checking out equipment as I was seriously debating buying my own kit to take with me to Pohnpei. As I got back to my hotel it started to pour rain so I relaxed and worked on my journal. When the rain slacked off I walked down to the internet cafe to update my journal and printed out more dive log pages. I'd decided to go see a movie so I took a taxi to a the Micronesia Mall cinemas - only a $26 fare! After a fast food dinner I caught the late showing of Pearl Harbor (which I liked). On the taxi ride back I realized it would have been about twenty percent cheaper to have rented a car for the day!
