Boat Trip, Snorkeling and SCUBA Diving

 

This morning Katie and Moe picked us up about 7:00 for our day of boating, snorkeling and SCUBA diving.  We had breakfast at Krispy Kreme Donuts and then headed to the boat place.  We had a boat almost to ourselves.  Also on the boat was a skipper, who drove the boat, a first mate, who did most everything else, and a dive master so that Moe could SCUBA dive.  No one is allowed to SCUBA dive alone.  You have to have a dive master with you.  We had to wear our abayas until we had stopped at the coast guard office right at the mouth of the Red Sea.  The boat place kept our passports and the coast guard got a copy of our passports when we stopped there.

 

 

 

The boat ride out to the coral reef took about an hour.  Mark used GPS location on his phone which showed that we were located about 15 miles out in the Red Sea.  He had 4 bars of signal on his phone out there!  There was no land in sight.  We 3 snorkelers got in the water first.  You could see all the way down to the bottom which was about 20 feet some places.  The crystal clear water amazes me!  The coral reef is beautiful and there were also quite a few fish.

 

Moe and the dive master and the skipper all SCUBA dived.  It was neat to watch them as long as we could see them while we were snorkeling.

 

 

 

 Eventually, we got out of the water and then waited for the SCUBA divers to come up.  While we waited, we watched the first mate fishing from the boat.  He would throw in a little fish or two and a bunch of fish would come up and start nibbling on it.  Then he would throw his line out past those fish and pull it in.  The line was just that.  Just fishing line with a hook tied on the end with a little piece of bait that he through out by hand.  He did pretty good fishing that way.  He caught a real pretty grouper among a few other things.

 

 

 

 .When the divers came up, the first mate fixed our lunch.  They had all kinds of sandwich fixings and also a cooler of drinks.

 

 

That's Moe on the right and the dive master on the left.  The dive master was from Turkey. The other two guys were from India.  Moe said it was funny to listen to them because they were all speaking broken Arabic to each other.  After we ate our lunch we headed to a ship wreck of an oil tanker.  The snorkelers got in the water first.  When the dive master got in he told us to get out, that the water was too rough and we would wear ourselves out.  We got to look at the ship wreck for about 10 minutes.  It was very cool looking but very eerie while I was wondering how the ship wreck had happened.  It was an old ship wreck because there was coral growing on the ship.  The SCUBA divers went ahead and dove the shipwreck.  Moe said that the bottom was about 40 feet.  The water was still crystal clear and we could see all the way to the bottom.  There were some bigger fish swimming around the ship wreck.

 

 

This is Moe in this picture.  Moe ran out of air after about 35 minutes so he and the skipper came up first. The dive master stayed down for about 10 more minutes doing some fishing.  He came out of the water with one more grouper and 2 beautiful parrot fish that were I'd say were about 18 inches long.  They are real pretty shades of blue and lavender and have a beak which is why they are called parrot fish. 

 

We left the ship wreck and headed back toward Jeddah to go to another coral reef so that we could snorkel a little more.  This one was also beautiful.  We saw about the same fish plus a few sting rays that were on the bottom.  Sting rays that are 10-15 feet below you are not so scary.  If they had been on the top, I would have been right out of the water!  We snorkeled for a little while but then saw a few jelly fish so we got out and came back to Jeddah.

 

While we were boating in, we were sitting on the front of the boat.  (Its hard to explain.)  It was a fun ride and every now and then we would get sprayed with water.  When we could see the coast guard station, Katie and I started putting our abayas back on.  That is very hard to do when you've been wet and you're all sticky and the abaya is a lot of material to get situated.  We were not done more than a minute when we got to the coast guard station.  There, a man in a uniform got on the boat to make sure that we weren't smuggling anyone extra in to Saudi Arabia.  We were cleared to go back to the dock.  Our entire boat trip lasted from 9:00 to 5:00.  It was great!

 

We stopped at TGI Fridays for supper and then headed to the hotel for showers and blogging.  I still feel like I am swaying on the boat and I still can't get the water out of my right ear!

 

Trivia for today:  All public education is segregated from after kindergarten or first grade.  (Moe couldn't remember which.)  The boys go to one school and the girls go to another all the way through high school.