Today’s entertainment was a scuba dive. We chose the dive operator conveniently located by the dinghy beach, signed our lives away, chatted with the French food security PhD candidate from Quebec, and hopped into the red Zodiac.

As infrequent divers with just the open water certification, we were not going near the currents of the Tiputa Pass. Instead we rolled off the zodiac at the edge of the reef on the ocean side of the pass, and did a pleasant drift along the edge of the wall into the abyss.

We hoped to dive with the Tiputa Pass dolphin pod, but they were nowhere to be seem. Nor were any other large fish.We just had to be happy with spectacular corals, schools of barracuda, an evil looking moray eel lurking in a hole in the coral, and a green turtle.

Plus the usual array of colorful reef fish. No complaints, here. It was nice to do a low stress dive that did not leave me grasping for backup air like the last two. An extra kilo of weight on my belt helped, so I was not fighting to stay at depth.

After diving, we just hung around at the dive shop for a while before having lunch at Snack Puna, on the pier. From our window seats over the shallow reef we saw almost as many fish as we did at depth, including three black tipped sharks cruising the shallows.

After lunch we biked to the other end of the island group again, in search of a store with eggs and any vegetables other than onions. There was a small supply ship unloading at the Avatoru end, and the grocery there had eggplants, zucchini, and carrots as well as eggs.

We got back to Tiputa pass just as the tourist boats lined up for the ebb tide dolphin show, but there were no dolphins performing this afternoon either. So we popped into our kayaks, and paddled back to the boat, where we saw a giant manta ray cruising at the surface. And I turned the afternoon vegetable haul into a tasty ratatouille.