Diving, Sailing, Surfing!

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The past few weeks have flown by. Have had so many things to keep myself busy with, from a PADI course, to surfing, sailing and meeting lots of new people. The diving was amazing. I ended up doing my four dives over two days at the weekend so I wasn’t missing any time at Fundar and my ears were a lot better, I didn’t have the same trouble with them as on my first dive. I just made sure I descended really slowly and if they started to hurt my instructor would pull me up a metre or so to stop the pain and we would go down again. On my last dive we went to a site called El Bajo where we had the slight chance of seeing hammerheads. I was pessimistic as I didn’t want to get my hopes up and thought if I didn’t see them I would be able to go to Seymour or Gordan’s rocks to have a 90% chance of seeing them. But we were in luck and half way through the dive I heard Macarron’s bell ringing and looked up to see about 8 hammerheads swimming above us. They weren’t there for very long but it was amazing to see them!!! So I am now a fully qualified open water PADI diver and saw hammerhead sharks, turtles and all kinds of amazing animals in the process.

The following weekend I was lucky enough to meet someone who was willing to take me for a surfing lesson to Tortuga bay. I thought the waves were pretty big, particularly compared to my past experience of surfing at Croyde in Devon but my teacher, Nicholas, told me the waves were small that day. I managed to get up on the board half way but I just enjoyed the experience. Hopefully in a couple of weeks we will go back again and with practice I will manage to get up properly. The next day we decided to borrow a friend’s boat and go sailing. It looked a bit like a large kayak with an enormous sail and it was really good to go round the bay learning how to turn and catch the wind so we could gather speed. We headed over to the calmer bay and put the anchor down so we could go for a swim and ended up at a set of stairs that led to a trail. As we walked along we arrived at a fence that looked down over a channel full of ‘Tintoreras’ white tip fin sharks. There were around 30 circling around and kept us amused for nearly 2 hours. It was so hard to pull ourselves away from watching them and the amazing view looking back to the island, and only when the sun started to set did we eventually leave.

My work at Fundar has also been going well. My routine now consists of two days in the office at the start of the week, then two days at the farm in Santa Rosa and then the Friday to recover. The work at the farm is really difficult particularly as it takes around an hour to get there and we walk for miles each day. A couple of weeks ago 20 children from the local school came to visit the farm so that was a nice change to play games with them, plant tomato seeds and pick radishes. They really enjoyed themselves and loved seeing the wild tortoises roaming around the surrounding fields.

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