August 31, 2005

PUERTO RICO: Wednesday, August 3, 2005

Wednesday morning was the same breakfast, only this time with the addition of buttered bread and (unexplicably) french fries. We were joined at breakfast by Klaus (a German drummer) and Laura (a clown — no really!). They were diving with us this morning. The rest of the divers arrived, and it was the largest group we had all week… Angel, Victor (divemaster), Robby, Kim (Robby’s cool friend), Klaus, Laura, and Emil along with Wendy & Drew.

We boarded the boat and headed out to “Efra’s Wall”, where a section has fallen in to leave a large crevasse to swim around and through. The dive was nothing tremendous (especially compared to the previous day’s dives) and Victor was generally too far ahead of the rest of the group.

During the surface interval, a couple of divers heaved over the side. Angel told us that people puke off his boat almost every day.

The second dive, to “Old Buoy” was nice — there was a lot of nice healthy coral cover, lots of fish, and many big barricuda. Wendy spotted a sand tilefish who would pick up a little piece of something from the bottom and move it over there before picking up something else and moving it over there.

It was a nice, quiet, relaxing dive to end on. Angel did some free-diving to come down and see us.

When the dives were done, we checked out with Angel and picked up a couple t-shirts and other fun little stuff from his shop. Wendy & Drew went to La Cosita (right outside our hotel) for a lunch of Garlic Shrimp with Corn Sticks and Asopallo Camaronnes with Sweet Plaintain. We then went back to Dave’s restaurant (again!) for t-shirts and stuff before heading back to the hotel’s pool for a swim and then to the room for a siesta.

Dinner was at Villa Parguera restaurant for dinner. It looked as if the entire restaurant had been lifted from the 1970’s and plopped into today. The food was very good — an appetizer plate of green banana, cheese balls, yucca, taquito, corn fritters, empanadilla (all fried) before the main courses of mofongo relleno con camaronnes & surf -n- turf. Coco flan for dessert.