First snorkeling! Day 2

After visiting the blowhole, we were excited to get out into the water and see some fish!  So we suited up and headed out.  While snorkeling, both of us wore dive skins which is essentially a swimming suit that has long sleeves and long pants.  This had several advantages over just wearing a normal swimsuit.  One was that we hardly had to wear any sunscreen, as only our heads and hands were showing at all.  This was good for us and great for the reef as some studies have shown that some components in sunscreen can kill reef creatures.  Also, it would protect us if we happened to run into a jellyfish.  Later, we ended up renting Scott a wetsuit because the water was too cold for him, but I found that the water was generally just fine for me.

Anyway, off to go snorkeling!  We saw our first sea turtle on this trip but she didn’t stick around.  I just managed to get one mediocre picture of her.

That’s Scott!  We also wore these bright yellow vests to increase our visibility since boats frequent some of the areas we were snorkeling.  Also, you could blow some air into them if you wanted to increase your buoyancy, which we really didn’t need, but it was nice to know we could float around in case we got caught in a current and got too far from shore and started to get tired.  Wearing fins was essential.  I love our fins!  They really make you cruise fast underwater with hardly any effort at all.

These guys are everywhere. 

Very cute fish that were quite small!  Only about the size of a lemon.

Morish Idol.  Didn’t see many of these.  They sure are beautiful!  Was probably about 10 inches from nose to tail.

These urchins were quite common along with some black spiny urchins that had spines over a foot long!

Sometimes we were swimming in only several feet of water over the reef and then would be in 20 or 30 feet of water.

As we were leaving, these guys for some reason kept circling us.

One of the best parts of this snorkeling trip was a huge school of tangs that we followed for a while.  They would swim to one part of the reef, eat off it for a while, then cruise to a new location.

A quick glimpse of a sea turtle about 20 feet below us.