Yesterday was cloudy and blustery all day. Today dawned crystal clear, beautiful blue sky with not a cloud. And it stayed that way. No morning cloudiness or shower, just beautiful sunshine all day. It was a perfect day for hookahing and the hookah must have thought so too as he worked perfectly all day. In the morning we went from the boat to the W end of the island, swimming the deep, outside of the reef first and then coming inside and doing the shallower part. The deep side was a sharp drop off, not really a wall, but very steep sand from ~20' to 50-60'. We stayed about in the middle, but wandered up and down as we saw something more interesting. It was superb. Lots of big coral and BIG fish. We saw a grouper that was easily 200#, also a 4' barracuda. Strangely, no angels. I also saw the strangest invertebrate I have ever seen – a seahare – look it up, that is how we identified it later. It looks like a relative of a conch that lost its shell! All green with tubular “horns” on the front and then another pair of some kind of projections and then a curled up body – very strange. We also ran into a shark sucker; no, not a remora, a shark sucker – look that up too. Of course, he thought he should hook on to one of us and it took quite a bit of thrashing about to convince him otherwise. We were in fairly shallow water at that point and we finally swam in to even shallower water and stood up until he lost interest and went away. Those things can really be a nuisance! Anyway, after the dive we swam back to the boat and tied hookah off to the stern swim ladder while we had lunch and rested a bit. Then back to do the E end. The original plan, since the E end was larger, was to swim along the outside as before and then short cut across the sand to come back – not real interesting, but a lot less swimming. It turns out the E end goes on forever. From the surface you can clearly see the shallow reef section, but what you can't see is that at about 20-30' it levels off and just keeps going – big clumps of reef on a sandy bottom. We saw another huge fish – I think it was a black grouper as it was at least 4' long and 200+# and there aren't many reef fish that get that big, but Deb thinks it was some kind of snapper. If so, it was far and away the largest snapper I have ever seen. It wasn't too interested in letting us get too close so we only saw it from some distance. We did, however, get up close and personal with a couple squid. These two were by themselves (they usually school) and seemed uninterested in us, but also unafraid. We got within 4-5' without swimming hard. Lots of other cool fish and coral – many baby trunk fish only 2” long. Finally I surfaced to see where we were and we were about half way to the other island! We turned back towards “our” island and continued into the shallower water. It turned out that the sand was really shallow, too shallow to swim comfortably. We were both still feeling fine, so we turned to swim back around the outside at the upper level – 10-20'. Unfortunately the wind was blowing that way and hookah got hung up on the breaking reef. I swam back for a better angle and pulled it off with no damage and then kept a short leash on him until we were around the corner where he could stream back away from the reef. At the shallower depth, the colors were more brilliant, but there were not the fantastic coral formations. Still, pretty darn nice. Back at the boat we relaxed with a new drink Deb named “Ginger Breeze.” The geek cookbook had a recipe for ginger soda (which turned out to be essentially weaker ginger beer) and I made some using the dregs of a couple of homebrews for the yeast. Ginger beer + dark rum = “Dark & Stormy” the national drink of Bermuda. Ginger soda + amber rum = Ginger Breeze. Not bad at all, but next time I will make the ginger beer much stronger of ginger. As a side benefit, the ginger that I used to make the soda, when dried is like candied ginger but with a real bite – WOW! This is a great place and we could stay here for a week or more easily, but there are several more places we want to go so tomorrow we will probably pick up and move again. All the distances here are short, so “moving” is more of a 1-2 hour rather than an all day affair.