Good dives, cool coral, music

After the excitement of singing with the women's association last weekend, and then the drama of having to tell a bunch of staff and volunteers off for rule breaking, this week has been relatively quiet in comparison.
Mostly, we've been scuba diving and training up the volunteers in their invertebrates. The visibility has improved markedly and so we've been able to do lots of training and dives. Somehow, I've also rediscovered the wonder of the whole underwater world. The interesting thing is that I'm not sure how I lost that wonder, or indeed, if I did lose it at all. But after a week of non-diving or poor visibility, going back into the water and seeing stuff again, elicited almost the same response in me as I feel every time I'm diving after a long break.
Partly, it's because I've started to relearn all my coral species, and so I'm spending a lot of time marvelling at the different species and the variety there, and the beauty of it all. And possibly partly it's also because I've had some chilled dives with some chilled divers and it's been incredibly satisfying to try and communicate my feelings of wonder of knowing what stuff is to someone else.
This week I've marvelled at some nudibranchs (sea slugs) of varying sizes, including one as
tiny as my little fingernail, and another the size of my foot. I also saw two having sex on another dive. I've also marvelled at the beauty of the acropora species of coral, which is often more brightly coloured than some of the others (here at least) and there have been lots of 'recruits' (young coral) of those species that I've noticed this week.
I've also marvelled at the biggest, meanist stonefish that I've ever seen in 10 years of diving. It was about a foot long and had the biggest grumpy mouth that I've seen and huge bulbous eyes. That was especially cool.
I also saw a very big puffer fish that was so large that it had its own remora on the top (hitchhiking fish). I've had many hours... Or at least, lots and lots of minutes of joy, pointing out the difference between coral in a massive form and coral in an encrusting form (it confuses most people here, at least initially) and just really loved all the dives this week. I've felt incredibly lucky to be in this 'job' and to get to indulge my hobby on an almost daily basis.
Also of note this week is that I actually have gone without my five mm long wetsuit and dived in a 5mm shortie instead! In ten years of diving, I've barely done any dives in anything other than a long wetsuit (3mm or 5mm) as I get quite cold easily. But I decided that it's plenty warm enough here and if I don't dive in a shortie here, then I probably never will. So far, I've only been cold once.
In other news, the group of vols is still pretty fun to hang out with and so I'm enjoying the social aspect of the job right now.
On the fruit front, we've only had pineapple this week though there are watermelons available in the village at the moment. At this time, they're not very ripe and seem to taste (and the flesh inside looks) more like cucumbers than watermelons that I'm used to. We've been without our full generator for the whole week. So no lights at night, except around the eating area as there has been small generator since Tuesday. I've not done a lot of work on the computer this week as a result, which has been quite a nice break actually! Still, it's gone on for long enough now and I hope they'll get the big one up and running pretty soon.
Raj from BV's London office is also out here at the moment. Happily, he brought me presents - a food, toothpaste and CD parcel from my parents (thanks!), and a really really brilliant set of speakers for my ipod which are really good quality. It's made me very happy to play music again rather than just play it via headphones into my ears, or hear it at the epi-bar on the worst music system and speakers in the world ever.
Talking of playing music, I've also been practising lots on Louis guitar which has been good fun. Not enough courage to play in big crowds, but getting more comfortable with anyone walking past hearing what I'm doing which is progress at least. And the heat has come back. It got cooler for a while there and we were lulled into a false sense of security about temperatures dropping, but it's back up to being humid and in the mid thirties again. Ouch.