divebunnie

Well today we had possibly the smallest group of divers on possibly one of our largest boats!

Three divers, and me bound for Ras Mohammed.

As it was a private boat, we had a nice late jetty time of noon, so I had the best of both worlds, a good lie in and a good couple of dives.

Shark and Yolande reefs are totally heaving at the moment, however there was very little current today, so sadly the barracudas, sharks and big stuff were all hiding elsewere. But we did see loads of the usual big fat snappers, giant trevallies, moray eels galore and a whole plethora of blue spotted rays.

The second dive was Jack Fish Alley, where two of us missed an eagle ray whilst admiring a crocodile fish, and we had a good meander through the chimney swim through caverns. In the main cavern there are even some little fan corals beginning to grow which is a good sign.

Once again at the end of the dive, we hung in the blue a touch looking through the shoals of fusiliers for a glimpse of something beasty, but it wasn’t to happen today. Never mind.

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Ah, so whilst Betty was traumatised by her op, to the extent that she didn’t even wash for 3 days, Boo was the opposite… so fine that she decided she didn’t need her stitches after three days, and pulled one out… ouch!

At first we thought it was not going to be too bad, however soon realised that removing that one stitch, 2 days early caused another stitch to pull open and she was running around with a hole in her belly. Ok she was actually quite happy and oblivious to this, but again not being the sharpest tool in the box, that didn’t really tell us much. She had probably not associated the pain with the fact that she kept licking her wound.

So… it was back to the vet once again and to our dismay, it meant putting her back under again, re-opening what was left of the wound and re-stitching it! Eek. Jilly was amazing watching the whole process and I thought I was doing pretty well until I started to feel a little hot around the collar… breaking out in a beady sweat. Thankfully I didn’t shame myself by actually keeling over, but I did feel a touch off-colour. Thankfully it was all over fairly quickly and we took our comatosed kitten back home to recover.

Two days later, she is now quite happy purring away laying beside me. However she did have to overcome the mortification and discomfort of wearing a sock over her body… which will remain there as long as she has stitches… she also went through great fun last night when we tried out a cone collar in the hope that we could then remove the sock. This really didn’t work as the thing was so heavy she had difficulty lifting her head enough to walk around and kept getting stuck with her head facing the floor… so we decided to stick with the sock. In comparison she was much happier with the latter.

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So my first day back at work after our holiday was a relatively chilled affair.

I was stationed at our smallest centre and was basically the spare part to pick up any walk-ins that wanted guiding off the beach or scuba reviews.

Whilst I am not so sure about the hanging around aspect of the job, the atmosphere was lovely and laid back at the centre. I had a potential scuba review and possibly four people to guide on a couple of dives, however this soon became a single chap who wanted two guided dives on the house reef before heading out on a boat tomorrow. Easy or what!

The dives were lovely. The area here is a little prone to currents, so we had a little bit of work at the beginning of each dive, but thankfully the current did turn by the afternoon, so at least the dives weren’t exactly identical.

Just having one person to guide meant I really got to appreciate the prettiness of the site. Especially the morning dive, with the reef on our left. The pinnacles here were fairly deep around 23M sporting spectacular gorgonian fan corals with their resident long nosed hawkfish not to mention the hordes of glassfish.

The water is lovely and warm at the moment too, so I barely got the chance to get cold before the dive was over.

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Ah… so the holiday was well worth it.

After an initial blip with our plans (ie the Dahab Hilton was fully booked!) and an extra day spent in Sharm, we headed up to Taba for our luxury break, taking full advantage of our special “locals” deal at the Hilton up there.

We called our usual cab driver Nour a young Bedoin guy for the journey, always a good idea if you are heading through the desert (and on our return journey, we found this out for sure!) and started on our 3-4 hours without aircon through the midday heat of the desert. Of course having the windows open just meant that you felt like you were in a fan assisted oven as opposed to your normal roaster!

But we survived the journey and by mid afternoon had moved into our lovely 5 star hotel room overlooking a little beach in the tiny resort of Taba.

Sadly the cold that I had caught (from Tigger the cat, I’m sure) had come on full throttle, so there was no chance of us sampling the wonders of diving up there, but to be honest, we were both a touch burnt out, so a few days of doing very little was probably just what the doctor ordered.

And… that is exactly what we did… we actually laid on the beach for three days!!! A little bit of sunbathing, a little bit of swimming and a lot of kipping in the shade!

Three days went very quickly and it was soon time to return. But… the good part is that we weren’t returning to dismal grey weather miles away from the sea… we were returning to more of the same sunshine and even nicer, warmer sea! Cool! So the usual end of holiday blues were not hanging over our heads.

The journey home was pretty uneventful until a few miles out of Sharm we got a flat tyre. This was where Nour’s wisdom came into force, as he had carried a spare on the roof for both journeys. OK I know this sounds obvious, but for any of you who have been out here, the thought of carrying a spare tyre really is not usually top priority. Anyway, it did cross my mind how easily you could find yourself in a situation here. We had already given the bulkd our water to another person in need earlier along the road, so had barely a litre left. Had we not had another tyre, we would have been in a bit of a pickle, with no mobile phone service in the area… and nothing like the AA or RAC even if there was a connection. It really was an eye opener.

Anyway, safely back in Sharm, nice and rested we returned to our lives here once more.

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Well, even those of us lucky enough to be doing what we love need a break now and then… and today is the day I get a well earned holiday.

Of course in true stylee I am feeling more tired than ever, have a sore throat, and my ears are clunky, so I am guessing that a bit of fun diving is not going to be on the agenda. But for sure, as someone who rarely gets the time to actually sunbathe, a bit of sun sand and sea is going to be top of the list.

See you all in a week.

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Ok, so the kittens are finally growing up, and have turned into two of the most adorable little cats. Tigger was a bit soppy from day one, but Boo the little runty one, took a little longer. However she is now totally affectionate and adorable.

Unfortunately, with that affection, she has been attracting a bit of attention from the boys, and after the trauma we had with her mum getting pregnant so soon after having had kittens, we didn’t want her to go through that as well.

So it was time to take her to the vet for her turn… eeek.

This time I decided to do it properly to avoid the totally devastating, cat running screaming around the car, and bought a proper cat box (yes it is even pink like the litter tray). Of course Boo, who is a little slow on the uptake, we have decided, went straight inside the box to have a good look around, as did Tigger. So, getting her inside was easy.

Thankfully, unlike Betty, she was much less devastated by the operation, and unlike Betty, and much to our relief, she actually wasn’t pregnant.

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So I drew the short straw today and whilst we did the back of Jackson, we had two versions of the dive… one out in the blue and the other next to the reef. We had one less experienced diver, as well as a couple who had tired of the blue dives with no guarantee of sharks (the fact that sharks had in fact appeared on every dive we had done on the back of Jackson was irrelevant here, I guess they wanted to guarantee something to look at on their last dive of the week).
So we jumped in a little after the others and proceeded to look at the remains of the Laura wreck perched on the back of the reef.
It is a bit of a wall dive here, with some corals to look at, but not the prettiest of dives, I must admit. However about halfway through the dive, our least experienced girlie started gesticulating wildly ahead of us and sure enough there was a baby white tip shark pottering along the reef itself! How cool was that?
So… both groups got sharks, we got our baby, and the guys in the blue got the gang of hammers! Smiles all around
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Well the week turned out to be a bit of a shark frenzy.

Ras Mohammed provided us once more with the absolutely vast shoal of barracudas, together with two very large Oceanic Black tip sharks meandering beneath the horde! Amazing.

The currents were pretty hairy though, so the stress levels were fairly high with a couple of our less experienced divers discovering what we really mean by “get in and down!” otherwise they would have found themselves separated by the group and taken around the back of the reef.