Day 2

I’ll start by presenting our current lodge and our dive centre today:

http://www.jangwani.org/hotel/home.asp

and http://www.hotelwhitesands.com/Entertainment.html

And now let me continue from where I stopped yesterday. We crashed in bed around 9.30pm, terribly tired by the travelling. The room was hot and little air blows through the insect nets, but I was way too tired to notice. We got up at 7.30 this morning, so don’t think we’re playing tourist around here! We had some issues finding diving tanks and an apt boat. We’d hoped to take tanks from the dive centre and go off alone on a fisherman’s boat, but in the end it turned out to be cheaper to just join in with the dive centre, and a lot less trouble. They understand what we want and allowed us to sample seaweeds on the reef. They even agreed to drop us separately on an island tomorrow and to come and pick us up for a dive in the afternoon.

So today we had our first dive! Though the bottom was visible from the surface, we dropped 30m along the reef, then coming back up slowly to the reef flat at 15m. The water was a comfortable 27°C, and the dive was very rewarding considering I already found an algal species which may be new to science. Beautiful coral too! I gotta say we encountered far less fish than you’d expect on a reef like that, and there was a lot of soft coral too instead of reef-building coral. We suspect it was due to the combination of sewage discharge from the nearby capital and blast fishing which, although illegal, is still practiced in the wider area… we definitely heard blasts under water!

The dive went without any issues, something we can’t say from the boat ride to and from the dive. The skies were overcast this morning when we embarked, but gradually the sun came out during our boat ride, and the high clouds could not prevent us from getting sun-burnt like lobsters. Lesson to learn: white guys ALWAYS need sunscreen in Africa, even on an overcast day…

During the afternoon we sorted out and preserved our algal collection, readily 40 species from the one single dive. That’s promising! Tomorrow is our last day here before heading off south. Hakuna matata!