This morning we began the day with another dive, this time on the ocean side of the north pass. This was definitely our best dive yet. The coral here was extremely colorful — light blue, lavender, bright yellow, dark yellow, black, white, various shades of beige. No single color was dominant. The coral also had a lot of variety in shapes, including some formations that looked almost flower-like in addition to all the shapes we had seen before.

We saw lots of new species, including Eagle Rays, bright orange fish with tiger stripes, a small, gray fish that had a spike coming out of it’s head like a unicorn, a dark yellow fish with black stripes and tiny blue dots, which we are sure is a variation of the black fish with the tiny blue dots. We saw a few more sharks that were swimming near some huge fish that were not much smaller than the sharks. The instructor said they are called napoleon in French and he was not sure of the English name. There was a funky fish that looked just like the coral hiding amongst the coral. I don’t even know how the dive master spotted him since he was so well camouflaged. And the most interesting sight of all were a couple large schools of ordinary looking medium sized silver fish with a black stripe near the top. These schools swam so tightly together that they looked like a humungous sea animal. Then the animal would appear to change shape some as the fish changed formation, and you would realize that this was no animal, it was a school of fish! We really wish we had a fish book so we could give you names of all these fascinating fish.

Everyone is so trusting around here. The last time we dove with them, the dive couple had said “oh, just pay next time”. This time, as they were dropping us off at Kosmos they said, “oh, just come and pay us later”.

After diving, we brought our bikes into town. We went to the post office to exchange dollars for francs, then went to the pizza stand for lunch. This time it was Mahi and Salami. Then we rode 6 km to the dive shop to pay for the two dives. The wind was blowing pretty strongly on our side and it was a tougher ride out than last time. The dive shop people kindly drove us back to town, which was nice because it would have been an equally tough ride back.

We stopped at the bakery to stock up on bread. So far, in the Marquesas and Tuomotus we have only seen two kinds of fresh baked bread, and we have seen no mass produced breads in the grocery stores. The most common bread is baguettes, which are extremely long, skinny loaves of French bread. Almost all sandwiches come on baguettes and the bread that is served in restaurants while you wait for your meal is always baguette slices. The other type of bread is coconut bread, which is closer in size and shape to a regular loaf of bread. Coconut bread has a definite hint of coconut and is sweet. It is similar in taste and texture to Hawaiian bread. It is yummy. Much to our surprise, the local bakery also had croissants and cheese Danish, which we have not seen before, so we got some of those.

Our last stop of the night was at Special Blend, who had just come back from the next island over. We visited with them for a while, then headed back to Kosmos for the night.