This morning I woke up feeling quite a bit better, I was even able to have a little bit of breakfast. Instead of diving in the morning we ended up taking a tour of Banda Naira Island. We first visited a small museum and while we were there my mom was out of it and ended up throwing up in the building, so she ended up going back to the boat with my dad and Kristen. After the museum we walked through town past the house where the Dutch and English signed the treaty trading Run Island for Manhattan, New Jersey and Delaware.
Then we stopped at someone's house and our guide showed us a nutmeg tree and opened up an immature fruit for us.
After that we headed up to Fort Belgica and looked around there for a while. There were some very nice views from the top of the towers.
After the fort we walked through the market area of town where they were making candy out of the nutmeg fruit, drying the mace and nutmeg seeds and selling it all plus much more.
When we were done in Banda Naira we were going to cruise over and visit a nutmeg plantation on Banda Besar, but it started to rain so we ended up turning around and heading back to the boat.
After we had lunch we started to get ready for our first dive, which would be around a little island called Batu Kapal. The island itself was probably about 1,500 square feet. The dive was a really fun dive with a lot of eels, some huge sea fans and the fish seemed a little less skittish than some of our other dives.
When we entered the water we dove down a wall to about 100 feet and swam around a little coral outcropping away from the island that had some nice sea fans. Then we came back to the island and rose to about 60 feet and continued around the island.
Eventually the reef we followed took us to about 30 feet and by that time my air was running low so I had to take my safety stop and got in the boat with Uncle Vic.
Our second and last dive of the day was off the coast of Banda Besara Island and it was called Pohon Miring. There was a little bit of a current, although not as strong as it could have been according to our dive guides, so this dive was a drift dive that ran along a large wall.
When we first jumped in there wasn't a lot of stuff to see, just a bunch of small fish that were hard to photograph. As we followed the wall there were more sea fans and some soft corals to see. After we had been in the water for five or ten minutes we went through a short cave that was fairly spacious and it had some corals growing throughout. After the swim through it seemed like the current picked up a little bit and eventually Uncle Vic and my dad got split up from our gourp and went with the other dive group.
As we kept drifting along we started to see more soft corals that looked like heads of broccoli or cauliflower. Eventually there were so many of them that it looked like an underwater cauliflower farm.
Somehow Stacy went through her air really quickly and so she had to go up and do her safety stop early and just before she started going up Marcel pointed out a couple of fish that seemed to be fighting. They would swim around a little bit and then all of a sudden ram each other and stay together for a second or two and they did this several times while we were watching. When we got tired of watching them we followed Stacy up to the surface and got back on the boat.
Since we weren't going to do any more dives today or tonight everybody showered up and lounged around as we waited for the spectacular sunset to arrive.
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