Thursday diving in Oman

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Today was quite amazing. We started out the morning early, and did not even have time for breakfast before whisking ourselves away to the Oman Dive Centre. We were supposed to be there by 8:00 am, so we thought we would leave by 7:00 am. Well, Dad’s watch was an hour off, so what we thought was 7:00 am was really 8:00 am. Luckily, we left a few minutes early, and did not encounter any traffic, so we arrived there only a few minutes late, and in time to get all our gear and get on the boat.

We made 3 dives today, 2 in the morning and 1 in the afternoon. The first dive was Novice Bay, then Cave Site, then Mermaid Bay. On all of the dives, there were rock reefs, as well as brain corals and soft corals, predominantly orange and purple. We saw many brightly colored fish, which was fun, because we were able to see all the different identifying marks, as well as the fish searching around for food hidden in the rocks. We also saw many moray eels, some small ones but a couple whopping ones. We saw a marbled ray and a lobster too, but the main highlight of the trip was the seahorse. It was HUGE, at least 8-12 inches, hiding under some soft corals. Apparently, it was the largest seahorse the guide, or anyone at the Dive Centre, had seen.

Between the morning and afternoon dives, we had lunch with the guide, Leigh, a British citizen working on a $1,000,000,000+ government botanical garden, and talked about the Middle East, current affairs, sports, and horticulture.

We drove back to the hotel, where we had a Thanksgiving dinner of Chinese fried rice. While memorable in its own way, it was a relatively poor substitute for turkey. As we were leaving very early in the morning, we settled up the hotel bill this evening, and requested a wakeup call at 4:45am and to have a taxi pick us up at 5:20. Our bus for Dubai was leaving at 6:00 am and we were told to be at the bus station at 5:30. We retired to bed, tired, ready for a day of traveling tomorrow.

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