11th March 2011

After a terrible nights sleep for some reason or another, we headed down to Crystal around 8.30am, ordered breakfast and met up with Nathan and some Marine Biology students over from Koh Phangan.

This morning, we dove Mae Haad reef, off the longtail and assisted in putting down some 5metre cross transects. This didn’t take long at all so, Simon, Nathan and I left the group and swam over to Junk Yard to see what additions had been made and to see the Sea Hares (really large Nudi branchs/sea slugs) which have appeared in the last couple of months due to the abundance of algae growing on the sea bed. It didn’t take long before I spotted one ..oh my goodness, I wasn’t expecting them to be so big. It was about the size of my fist.

Apparently the numbers have declined in the last month but I think we saw at least half a dozen of them on the dive. Apart from the new sea life, puffa’s , batfish to name but a few, the coral nursary’s we’d put down before we left, are doing extremely well. I think we’ll soon be doing some transplanting!!

After a 65 minute dive, we headed back in to shore, washed out kit and went home for a shower. I had intentions of mailing people but promptly fell asleep for a couple of hours while Si did some UK work.

Around 7pm, we met the Crystal crew and started dance rehearsals which went pretty well seeing we’ve missed 3 sessions ..as I think we’ve mentioned it’s a medley of the Village People tracks ..really annoying when you’re humming them whilst diving ;-D

Rehearsal over and done with, we headed out for food and beer to the ‘soft’ opening (I suppose that means, not quite finished) of ‘Vibe Lounge" ...which used to be Dirty Nellys but is now under new ownership. ‘VIBE’ used to be a cool beach bar down in Sairee but had to close do to landlord issues .. anyway.. a few drinks later it was bed for an early nite..

x

Jen