Location: Pinchers, Palau
Good evening from Palau! (or, for our audiences in the United States, good morning!)
Today, we started our morning at 7:00 AM sharp to Toploader’s “Dancin’ in the Moonlight,” a definite recommendation if you ever find yourself on a 3-4 AM anchor watch and need a morning pick-me-up. We started our morning with a new anchorage just in time for breakfast. We’ve been here to Seahorse Bay before, but it’s everyone’s favorite anchorage so far because it’s so beautiful and absolutely teeming with life. A positively perfect location for diving- which is what we did pretty much all day!
After breakfast, the students who are already advanced open water certified got to go on a fun dive (which is what we call a dive that isn’t for certification but just to explore Palau’s underwater beauty). While they were doing that, a few of us went out snorkeling/freediving around some of the high limestone islands. I free-dive a ton back home in Florida, but I had never seen anything like this! We saw some really incredible things- the shallow fringing reefs in the area are just as teeming with life as the deeper ones. We went out with Carolyn, our Marine Biology instructor, so we got to learn a lot about what we were seeing. I’m a marine biology major back at school (shoutout to all the homies at Eckerd), so I was geeking out the whole time. The highlight was definitely a little multicolored octopus peering out at us from a crack in the reef, but we also saw about 50 species of fish, hard and soft corals, bright turquoise giant clams, and some of the biggest sea cucumbers I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen a fair few). We stayed out so long, all of our cameras died before we came back in around lunchtime.
After a delicious lunch of pot pie, our recently certified open water divers (including yours truly) went in for our first advanced training dive- the navigational dive! We used compasses to navigate in a straight line and a square and then used the natural reef features around us to navigate in a loop. It was challenging because the visibility today was slightly less than we’ve been used to. But all of us made it back alive! It’s really cool to be able to do this type of training in such a beautiful location, especially since I had never SCUBA dived (dived? dove? this is a hot subject of debate here on Argo).
We also had one lucky group of advanced open water students who got to do their peak performance buoyancy dive, which is where you pretty much play games at the bottom with your weights and BCD (buoyancy control device). The rest of us spent our free time in different ways. Personally, I worked on some homework (yes, rest assured, they do make us do work here- it’s not all sightseeing and SCUBA diving). Other students elected to get in the water, take some pictures, write home, or participate in the arm-wrestling league we have running here on Argo.
After dinner (which was deliciously sweet and sour chicken and rice bowls), we started prepping for yet ANOTHER advanced open water dive- the night dive!! I was slightly nervous just because of the aforementioned lack of SCUBA experience, but it was actually really fun. We saw a spiny rockfish, a really big blue sea star, and a ton of coral. We also extinguished our flashlights at one point, and the water around us lit up with bioluminescent plankton. That was my favorite part for sure. On our surface swim back to the boat, it was dark enough that we could see hundreds of stars and even the outline of one arm of the milky way galaxy. We got back around 9, which is bedtime for me (especially since I’m getting up at six tomorrow to help Gabe- our seamanship instructor- make challah). Thanks for following along!
Love from the Argo,
Margo
(also sometimes known as Isabel, but that doesn’t rhyme as well)
P.S. Hi to the fam! I am, in fact, alive. Miss you!
Photo Captions:
1. Chloe helping to steer to our new anchorage, as Lolo and Lucia look on
2. The high limestone islands- a really neat geographical feature that I would 100% recommend looking up
3. Me freediving in the corals- there were a lot more colors in person (taken by Kayli)
4. Our octopus friend!
5. Whitney, Amelia, and Emma enjoying the water
6. The stars over our night dive- there were so many more than the camera couldn’t capture! (taken by Emma)
7. Our current anchorage- can you guess why the bay we’re next to is called Pinchers Bay?