Tuesday, November 25, 2025
Today was another dive day. We woke up about 6:45, and got ready to be at the dive shop at 8:30.
We arrived a few minutes early, and Ditte, today’s Divemaster, helped us get our gear into our boxes and ready for the bus.
We had 10 divers today, and they again split us into two groups. In our group with Ditte was a Canadian woman and a couple from Switzerland.
The first dive site was Tug Boat. Its geographically quite close to Sunday’s first dive. We receive our dive briefing and gear up. Ditte talked about what we might see and asked if we had any questions.
Since she mentioned that we could see octopus, I asked her if she saw an octopus, to be sure and make sure I saw it too.
Wouldn’t you know, we’d been under the surface for only about 5 minutes, and there was an octopus on a rock. Ditte made sure I saw it, but I might have even seen it before she pointed it out. Goal achieved!
The remainder of the dive we saw a little shrimp, puffer fish, scorpion fish, fire worms, spotted sea snake, crinoid, and a little hawksbill turtle.
We came out of the water after 70 minutes, took off our gear, had a few cookies, and got back on the bus to go to the next dive site.
Our second dive site was Director’s Bay, and we saw a few eels, a lobster, a lionfish, juvenile flounder, French Angel fish, juvenile drum, brittle star, and my favorite, little fairy basslets.
After the dive, we loaded back up onto the bus, back to the shop, and cleaned up our gear. We made a quick trip to the close grocery store for yogurt, cheese and cookies, before we headed back to the hotel room for a quick lunch.
While we were at the grocery store, our contractor texted Nathan to let us know some of their concerns with the tile for the bathroom, so as we were eating, Nathan was texting them back and spoke to them over the phone.
Two issues came up. One, the wall tiles have an irregular length, leading to irregular thicknesses of the grout lines. The tiles are handcrafted and each one is unique and slightly imperfect. The GC sent pictures. I told Nathan I thought it looked baller. We went back and forth on keeping the layout or changing it, and asked for the tile guy’s recommendation. In the end, we’re slightly modifying the layout, and I’m not concerned.
The second issue that was brought to our attention was more concerning to me. The floor tiles noticeably scratch with just a fingernail. We asked the construction super to go to the basement and grab our sample tile to see if it also scratched. It didn’t. Weird. By the end of the day the tile supplier had learned that our three boxes of floor tiles had left the factory without the scratch resistant coating. Super weird. No idea on the eta for new, sturdier tiles.
Crises averted, we fixed a cocktail and headed down to the pool with our books.