About Last Night

Last night was a long one, and potentially the least pleasant double date I've ever been on. The boat started getting extremely rocky around 9 pm, just as we were trying to go sleep. It got to Isabel and we spent the next three hours at the back of the boat as she was seasick. One consolation was that she was not the only one, there was another girl, Bew, who had it just as bad. He boyfriend Carl was out there with her, thus a double date. Also, Estelle, one of the hostesses (crew member) was out there too. She was a saint for putting up with them. Anyway, that's enough said about that.
Let's talk about diving. There were five planned dives today, which is a lot for those who don't know. Isabel took a miss on the first one, as did Bew. Rins the trip director did wouldn't even entertain the idea of them going on that dive. As was to be expected, I didn't really get enough sleep last night, but a pretty effective way to wake up is to jump into the ocean with a bunch of weight on your back. Sink or swim takes a different, and more confusing meaning. It should be sink or maintain buoyancy...
That dive we saw a few little black tip reef sharks, but nothing too outlandish. Sharks are cool though

Sharks are not scary underwater. They do their thing, you do yours, and no one gets upset
In the words of Shark Hulk, you wont like me when I'm angry

Some idiot swimming around with his reg out

Honestly, I can even remember much of the next dive. Isabel was back and the entire group had to go up before the divemaster and I due to air concerns. We saw a few more sharks once everyone was gone, but yeah, it was mainly the usual suspects. This does mark two dives in a row that there have been sharks but Isabel didn't see them. One day she'll see a shark. 

Third dive had a massive barracuda and some reef fish and a lionfish.

They're not evil in the Pacific, but if you see them in the Atlantic, kill them. Or get someone
who knows what they're doing to kill them as they're extremely venomous. Then you can fry
the meat and they're quite tasty. See more in my cooking blog speargun sushi

The fourth dive, finally something that can be exciting to explain to others. We were checking out a site with a lot of caves, which I hate because it's claustrophobic and terrifying, but I'm too self concious to ever admit that. I can write it here safely because no one actually reads the words. I whacked my head on the first, my tank on the second and just didn't go into the other ones. I swam over the caves and followed the bubbles. So the group we've been traveling with a fair amount I will refer to as team bro. There are two Kiwis who I'd put in their late twenties, Tom and Andrew. I'm betting they were partiers in college, but not have settled into their careers and while they like to have fun, have nothing to prove. Then there is also Bobby, who is a American doing a semester abroad in Australia. He plays lacrosse...enough said. He's adorable in an I-think-I'm-very-cool-but-come-off-as-an-eight-year-old kind of way. He learned how to dive last week, so he's a bit inexperienced, but someone gave him a GoPro. This means rather than trying to improve his skills he tries to get pictures of everything. It's a bit irritating, but after a few dives you figure out just to give him a wide berth. The last group members are me, diver extraordinaire (unbiased opinion of course), and Isabel, who is awesome and great and don't hurt me. So the other three guys guzzle down air, probably a bit due to being a little comfortable underwater and probably due to being larger me. So they got sent up and then AJ (leader of that dive) brought us over to some anemone fish.

This would have been much more romantic Isabel hadn't been floating just above my shoulder

The reason the fish were completely fearless is that they were protecting their eggs, so pretty much we harassed them and made faces at them until Isabel ran low on air.

Sushi with roe for dinner anyone?

Then AJ and I swam around for a while, saw a giant Wrasse and then called it a dive. We each had about 50 bar left, not bad for an hour underwater.
The last dive was a night dive that took place in the same site as where we we're pissing off the anemone fish. The site was named Admiralty because there was a large, old school anchor hanging out in a cave. Rins asked us if we knew how it got there, because he didn't. Big heavy anchor, with no easy way for it to have gotten there. We'll never know

Anchor

The highlight of the night dive were two fold. Firstly we saw flashlight fish. They're pretty cool. Secondly I found a black and white banded eel that looked a lot like a seasnake (it wasn't). So I'm having my flashlight wildly to get the attention of a nearby group, but they had seen something and were doing the exact same thing. I swam close to see what they found. It could have been the twin to my eel. They found the exact same thing at the exact same time and we all wanted to show each other something they'd found by themselves...typical.
We finished the dive and then it was bed time. The journey will be much less rocky tonight, so that's a relief. Hopefully I'll get more than 5 hours of sleep.
Anyway, here's a picture of the Spirit of Freedom for fun

Saint Patrick's Day

Let me guess, you saw the title and assumed that it was going to be all about drinking. Well guess what, you're wrong. Only the second half is going to be about drinking. The first half will be about what I did earlier in the day. So last week Gav asked me if I was interested in going out to some park and doing a five hour hike or something, and I said sure. I didn't really go out Friday because Wednesday was still hitting me pretty hard. So Gav gave me a call that morning to essentially tell me be ready to get my ass out of bed. He had invited a couple other people, but between rugby practice and the previous night's festivities, they were both unavailable. We set off and I did my best not to sleep in the car, which is almost a given for me. We went out hiking and it was not what I expected. I thought we were going to be on trails for most of it, but when we were on trails it was pretty waterlogged and trying to dodge the really wet parts. Luckily I had waterproof shoes, but Gav was less lucky. Once we got through that part we got to the actual mountain part, Mount Field East. We didn't hike all the way from the bottom, where we started seemed a good deal of the way up. So when we got to the mountainy part, the terrain became very rocky and we started hopping from rock to rock all the way up. As we got higher the wind got worse and worse and worse until it felt like nature was literally trying to throw us off the mountain. We persevered and made it up. Then we had some chips on top of the mountain. We got some epic pictures,  And there was also a rainbow we saw a bunch.We actually got a cool view where you could just see the top of the rainbow over the mountain so it looked like it was sitting on top of the mountain. the internet is being mean and not putting them up. They are on facebook though.
We did have a little trouble with the way back because there was one point that we couldn't find the trail back and it took many incorrect turns to finally find the real one. We survived and then to look at some waterfalls. Those are also on facebook. It was fun, but probably good that not too many other people came because it was a kinda physically demanding.
We got back around 6:30 and after grabbing dinner, Tess came in to yell at everyone for not being at her birthday party yet. Some of us shuffled over and became involved in a game of battle shots. THis is not Conant's version, it was exactly like battleship only with drinking. I played with Ira, we won even though Tess and Emily kept cheating and telling us the wrong answers. So that was fun for a while, there was some wii sports, attempted trick shots with ping pong balls, a defeat in root and won conversations. After that we did go out, though there was a lengthy break back in Fisher is Millsy room. Caitlin may or may not have gotten a concussion, we weren't sure. My mouth and the english language did fail me and say some incorrect things. A group of people were in Millsy room, mainly the Saint Pat's kids. It was a good time involving more beer and photobooth. then we eventually left and went down to lower house. while we were in line i ended up talking to some Norwegian girls, pretty random, and I was pretty drunk at that point. One of them gave me a giant green hat. From Lower House we went to Irish, because of the holiday. It was less packed than we expected. They did have lots of Guinness, which was absolutely disgusting. Even after having drunken a lot, it still was disgusting. I couldn't even finish the pint I had gotten. We were heading to Mobius but branchy and I didn't really want to go there. While we were waiting on line, I got into a debate over what's a better profession, medicine or investment banking. It was really a waste of air, and I think the other guy was lying his ass off about how much money he made. Branchy and I left mid debate (though the other "investment banker" told me as I was leaving that he didn't believe in only caring about money either). after that we finally headed back to fisher, right around the same time that a lot of other people got back. I had grabbed my waterbottle and sprayed Dylan with it. He took revenge with interest and told me to never do that again...so of course I had to do it immediately. It's not my fault. Then some people hung out in branchy's room for a bit, then called it a night. No hangover!