Tuesday — Yesterday Christi started a SCUBA certification class. This is the perfect place. Warm, clear water. An instructor whose native tongue is English. With the favorable exchange rate, the price is good.

The first day of class was mostly lecture with a couple hours in shallow water practicing basic skills. The instructor chided her when he looked in her logbook and saw the dive in Suwarrow to 72 feet and the one in Niue through a cave to 102 feet.

While Christi was in class, Eric was the social butterfly. He stayed at the Aquarium Cafe for a while visiting with the other yachties, then pulled out a kayak and kayaked around the harbor visiting with various boats.

We went to dinner at Tonga Bob’s Restaurant, which we thought was oddly named for a
Mexican restaurant. The food was pretty good and it was close to Mexican food we are used to, but not quite. We miss the wonderful Mexican food we used to eat all the time in San Diego.

In the islands, they burn trash and brush, so there are usually a lot of small fires. At dinner time, there was an especially large and smoky fire that made the sky appear especially pink at sunset.

Today Eric went diving with a local dive company, along with Eric and Gisela the boat Far Niente. This turned into two exciting dives. The first was a Tonga “signature dive” known as Split Rock. The first stop was a cave. This made Eric a bit nervous, but he made it in just fine. It was not quite pitch black, but flashlights did help. There were three sharks hovering at the bottom of the cave. They were between two and three feet long. Then they went under a massive arch and around to a huge rock that was split down the center. There were quite a few fish, including a massive Napolean fish.

The next dive was called “5 fingers”, and was through a finger shaped coastline of one of the islands. At the start of the dive Eric saw a “ghost coral” which turned from dark brown to a ghostly white when you touched it. In two of the “fingers” there were two long tunnels, just large enough to fit a diver. Most of the time there was a crack in the ceiling to let in some light. It felt a bit tight at times, and the dive master helped you get through a tight spot at the end of one of the tunnels.

Meanwhile, Christi continued SCUBA class. Just like Eric, she was going for her Open Water Diver certification from the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI). There was more lecture time, then shallow water practice, followed by a dive in the harbor. The coral in the harbor was probably spectacular once upon a time, but it is currently mostly dead, with only a few spots of color and a few fish. There were a lot of bright blue starfish and a few small versions of the puffy pink starfish we had seen in Suwarrow. Surprisingly enough, we saw a manta ray, too.