Day 224! No boat troubles this morning! Today was another nice mix of diving and friends. It’s been a really nice schedule lately, having a blast underwater with friends and then having more fun back on land. It’s a pretty dang cool life, if you ask me!

Today I was taking out a solo fun diver for our morning dives. Our first dive site was actually one I had never been to. So it was going to be a nice navigation challenge to start off the day!

My fun diver today was Sophie, unfortunately not my sibling… in fact, there was a total of FOUR Sophie’s on the boat today. Sophie was from New Zealand and was just ending her travels with some scuba diving.

We got to our first dive site, which was Green Rock! This is a dive site I’ve been wanting to go to but have been a bit apprehensive about because it is known for having a lot of trigger pits (trigger fish can be aggressive from time to time). This site is also known for having current as well.

Just a fun fact about this dive site, it was found by the same man who found the dive sites White Rock and Red Rock. These sites weren’t named for the color of the biggest rock at the dive site. I just found out the guy was Italian and he made it the colors of the Italian flag.

Sophie was super excited to dive and had just gotten her advanced certification in Bali. So this was her first time diving in a week or two. We hopped into Green Rock and started our journey around this new dive site (for me).

At the start we saw a lot of coral scattered about the sea floor. In this bits and pieces were a TON of tiny nudibranches. I had never seen such small ones before which was quite fun!

We also saw a pair of six banded angel fish, which I love and rarely see!

This wasn’t the only creature in the water today that I rarely see… during the dive a random diver gave us the sign for turtle and pointed to the opposite side of the dive site. I was pretty shocked to see this and trusted this persons tip. So we made our way across the dive site.

Sure enough, there was a group of divers surrounding a pinnacle. But before we could get to it the turtle went up to the surface.

But, I knew it had to come down inevitably. Most divers moved on, but I followed it for a little bit. Eventually it did start coming down, right in front of us! We followed it a bit more and got super close to it as it chomped away at corals and rocks.

I was super excited to see this green turtle, it’s not that common to see them while diving since they’re usually relatively shallow. But my fun diver seemed rather unenthused. I asked her after the dive and she had seen a number of turtles while diving in Indonesia… so I guess she just got spoiled a bit. Either way, I was pumped!

I really enjoyed Green Rock. At the beginning of the dive, the visibility wasn’t great. But by the end it was gorgeous, the sun was shining through the site, and the pinnacles and corals were looking incredible. There was a ton of sea life too swimming about. There was also no current and the trigger fish were all occupied with eating, mating, or fighting other trigger fish to care about us.

For our second dive, we went to HTMS Suphairin.

This was, apparently, the first shipwreck Sophie had seen. She was super excited to dive around it and check out all the nooks and crannies. She was a lot more jazzed for this than the turtle.

We spotted a number of the small, purple nudibranches that are littered across the shipwreck as well.

We then made our way to No Name pinnacle until the end of our dive.

It was an easy and fun morning of dives. Sophie was a good diver and made my life very easy underwater! I also really enjoyed the dives as well, the more I dive, the more and more comfortable I feel in the water. I’ve hit a point where it’s starting to feel second nature, which is super cool!

I had the afternoon off, so I went to Taco Shack for lunch.

Nui, my refresher and hostel receptionist, had some leftovers from her homemade lunch and she put them on top of my fried rice. It was very sweet of her and very delicious.

I then went home to nap and got quickly woken up by my cleaning lady asking if it’d be okay to clean. I said yes and then made my way back to Taco to hang until it was done.

While I was waiting, my friend Pauline invited me over to hang. So I hung out with her, Gracie, and James. We just sat around and enjoyed each other’s company! It was a great way to spend my free afternoon.

We then went to Bingo for dinner. I’m a huge fan of their Laab, so I got that again.

After dinner, it was time for sunset! So we hopped on our motorbikes and made our way up to our secret viewpoint.

It was another incredible sunset! I’m really happy I’ve been able to see so many good ones recently, I’ve missed watching sunsets.

We watched the sunset until the stars came out and waited even longer to see the stars better. Even with the light pollution from the island, the stars were pretty spectacular. I got lucky and saw a shooting star as well!

I went back to Taco for a snack of French fries and some pool against my DMT friend, Chris. Another new DMT just joined, named Tom. He came and hung out as well. Eventually karaoke night started and I sang a duet of Cheerleader with my friend Myo. He always kicks off karaoke night with this song but he enjoys singing it with someone.

After singing and forcing a few travelers to sing as well, I called it an early night. I have the day off tomorrow but I wanted to have an early night to catch up on sleep.

– Elie