Rusty here–Thursday was Caño Island. We started the hour drive down the coast to Uvita where we got all our scuba stuff. This was a five star operation where everything was taken care of for you, and everything was first class. We walked across the beach to our boat out into the surf. This part was pretty fun. Then we started an hour long boat ride out to Caño Island. The scenery was just perfect. Almost impossible to describe the green dense jungle curling around and meeting the ocean. Like out of stories.

Along the way I spotted some fins in the distance and called out “dolphins!”. The captain took us over where we saw a pod of spotted dolphins swim alongside our boat. A few minutes later we made it to Caño island and “the garden” for our first dive. This was our first time in open water and turns out we did it kind of wrong. We thought that by combining finishing our scuba certification with our dives would be the way to go. But unfortunately we were stuck doing a bunch of skill pass off and we were in a group of 4 and one of the students was having a VERY hard time such that it made actual diving and exploring impossible 😦 So we did go down and see a turtle along the bottom and some small sharks in the distance, but we didn’t see near as much as the kids who were snorkeling. Sounds like they had a blast. Blake said they saw like 6 turtles and a bunch of sharks and all sorts of other things. Halle said it was the best snorkeling she’s ever done. We went one more place that was even deeper and had similar results. Tara and I were just waiting on the bottom but we couldn’t swim around because someone in our group was having all sorts of problems. So we just sat there and tried to poke around a little bit. We were deep! Like 55 ft deep! That was crazy to be down so far in the ocean. This second spot was called “sharks cove”. Once again the kids had an amazing second dive. The guide was great. She would point out all kinds of things to the kids, and then they’d all surface and she’d teach them a little about what they saw. We saw more dolphins and rode back.

Tara and I were a little disappointed in our diving experience. It wasn’t what we thought it was going to be, which was a little skills and mostly exploring. Instead it was the opposite. But you win some you lose some. We made it back and the owner asked how was it and I said “fine” because it was. We talked about it, but at the end of the day it wasn’t his fault and that’s the truth. But still so glad we did it.

The kids were wrecked at this point and didn’t want to do anything, but we stopped at a little soda (tiny, local restaurant) and ordered huge smoothies with ice cream and fries. That really seemed to help things.

We drove up to my favorite beach of the entire trip, Playa Bonita. It was just HUGE and we could drive our car far along the beach and park it along the beach and NOBODY was there. We had the entire beach to ourselves except there was another family that was surfing and body boarding and I noticed they had an extra board on the beach so I asked if we could use it and blake and josh and I had a blast body boarding on the beach that we had all to ourselves. SO MUCH FUN. The sunset again was amazing. Tara was amazing. It was just great. The only not great thing was that I left my Keens at this beach! We went back a few days later to look for them, but no luck.

At night we would either play clash Royale, tried to watch a movie (josh and I watched top gun one night), and tara and halle would watch Downton Abbey. In the morning we snuggled and listened to or watched the wildlife out side our windows. It got bright as day by like 530 am.