VERY inauspicious start to our South Pacific trek
First, I left my Kindle on the Southwest flight from Nashville to LA, and didn't notice it for several hours, thus too late to try and retrieve it. So, I was using my laptop as my (heavy) Kindle, after downloading the Kindle app at the airport, and then loading it with the books I borrowed from the library, originally on my Kindle.
After an uneventful (and actually restful) overnight flight to Fiji, we spent our first day there, just hanging out at the pool and napping and reading in our room. The next day we boarded the Nai'a, our floating home for the next 10 days. This is a liveaboard dive boat, where the motto is: "eat, sleep, dive, repeat". We dove three to four times a day, on different sites every time, and it was fantastic! After the first two days of cloudy skies, every day after was virtually cloudless, and with constant breezes.
A nudibranch (fancy name for a sea slug)
Second, Steve was starting to download his GoPro videos to my laptop when he spilled a glass of wine on the keyboard. There went our computer access, as well as my ability to save my photos. :-( Luckily, there were very nice shipmates who offered their computers for me to download my pictures and then save them to a thumb drive.
A pipefish (relative of a seahorse) - about 4 inches long
Third, I developed skin bends, which is a mild form of decompression sickness - meaning no more diving for me! This happened on our 7th day of diving, after I dove to 80-85 ft. to document that little guy in the picture above, and stayed down just too long for my body, I guess. My dive computer showed I was diving within safety limits (according to tables), but my body disagreed. My symptoms were a light red rash that itched and hurt, but disappeared completely after breathing pure O2 for a couple of hours. I had no other symptoms and no residual issues.
As this trip through all these upcoming island nations is mostly diving, I was really bummed. I intend to just snorkel for a couple of weeks, then do limited diving (only 1 or 2 shallow dives a day). When we return to the states, I'll see a hyperbaric (diving) specialist, and ask for specific recommendations for the future.
Cleaner shrimp working on one of our dive masters (it tickled when they cleaned mine)
We're now in the Solomon Islands (actually on Guadalcanal, for those history buffs out there), with VERY slow Internet. We got a spare keyboard from the super helpful IT guy here at the hotel, so I could get a blog post out. We're going shopping tomorrow to buy one, so hopefully I'll be able to continue to keep in touch. However, our next stop is a very small remote eco- lodge on another island, where Internet access is spotty at best. As it took me over an hour to put out this post, we'll have to see if any more posts will be forthcoming in the next month. We'll be spending 2 weeks at the eco-lodge, then 1 week on a catamaran sailing up north through more of the Solomons, then on up to Papua New Guinea (specifically the island of New Ireland) for another week of diving, before heading back to civilization in Sydney near the end of June. Hopefully, you'll hear from me before then.
We'll try and send some of our neat videos, when we can.
