So today we went snorkling. Wow. Before coming to Puerto Rico, I had never been snorkling. I went on Monday at the beach for about 30 minutes after about an hour of swimming around the reef without any gear. Even there, where the reef must have seen many unwelcome visitors, the water was full of fish and urchins. There were tons of urchins everywhere. Several people were stung by them, and a few of those were poisonous. It was nothing serious, but the sting left a small piece of the spike in the skin and if it were poisonous, it caused a small area around the prick to turn purple. I was not stung, but that was mostly because I was not adventurous enough to try any of the things that got the others stung, namely swiming into caves in the coral, walking around in the tide pools without watching the ground and (seriously) attempting to grab a spike from the urchins body.

At the edge of the reef where the open ocean began, there was a drop off of about 35-40 feet straight down. It was really scary to look out there and see nothing in front, on either side or even below.

That was Monday. Today we went on a catamaran and sailed out to a shallow reef off the shore of one of the smaller islands that are considered part of Puerto Rico. Here I was able to really get good at snorkling. We were given a mask, snorkle and flippers by the boat crew and were set loose on the reef.

I am an asthmatic, which has not really bothered me in a long time, but because of this I took a long time to get used to breathing through a tube. Because I am an asthmatic, I need more air in my lungs than most people, or at least I feel like I do. When we first went out, I got tired very quickly. I had to stop every few feet and take off my mask to catch my breath. Eventually I got used to using the flippers and found that if I moved my feet a little bit, I could float on the surface with my face in the water allowing me to breath almost normally and still see underwater. Once I mastered this, I was able to dive very deep to see all the coral up close, and then rest and catch my breath on the surface with my face still in the water.

At this reef we saw several colorful parrot fish, as well as a number of these electric blue fish. The lucky ones among us saw a school of these with about 20 fish. I followed it for a few minutes, and got very close. The closest I got to them was about three feet away. We stayed at this location for a little less than 2 hours, and then we boarded the catamaran to travel to another, deeper reef.

After we got out of the water, we had lunch as provided by the boat's crew. We had sandwiches and a cold macaroni pasta, which we washed down with the most wonderful pina coladas.

Once we got to the new location, we were actually within a short swim of the Atlantic Ocean. We were required to stay in the Carribean Sea, but we were that close!

Here we were given bread and told to feed it to the fish. We took fistfuls of bread and dove into the water. We could swim up to a fish and actually hand feed them! This was with the risk of getting bitten on the fingers, but no fish there was capable of doing any damage to your hand. As I swam around the reef, I would peer into the deep cracks in the coral to see what was there. I often saw an urchin lurking in the dark. Some had spines as much as eight inches long, meaning the whole thing took up a sphere 20 inches in diameter! Needles to say, I did not attempt to go any further into these holes.

As I made my way back around to the boat, I saw that the area where we were feeding the fish was full of fish of all colors of the rainbow. A quick search on Wikipedia told me that one of these species was the yellowtail snapper. There were also damselfish, which were really cool looking, but very shy. There were a bunch of others, including a number of parrot fish, some cool fish with red heads fading into a white body with red-orange speckles, and so many others I can't remember them all.

We finally left for shore at 2:30, and made it back to our hospitality by five-ish. I took a nap and went to a meeting with the Church in Humacao. There was a meal, singing and a time of sharing. After that we returned and packed it in for the night. Tomorrow will be a long day of shopping.

Also, my father sent me two text messages. Evidently he forgot that the main screen on my phone is defunct. I cannot read text messages.