Advanced Open Water

We've been at Sabang Beach for the past couple of days, a section of Puerto Galera on Mindoro Island. It's a busy place with lots of activity (not our favorite surroundings) but the place we're staying at is amazing and the diving is absolutely unparalleled. The activity is worth putting up with just to get under the surface for a few short moments. We don't have many dives in our log books but we can be certain there aren't many places in the world with such a rich biodiversity underneath the surface.

Really, we can't even describe what we've seen. I try and remember some things to write down later but there's just too much to keep track of. Bright colors, friendly fish, tons of starfish, lion fish, amazing anemones, nematodes, frog fish, angler fish (the kind that have a little thing dangling in front of their mouths to attract other fish like in Finding Nemo), beautiful and vast coral structures, and the list goes on. I wish I could be filming everything so we can go back later and identify all the species. Truly amazing what God has created.

Today we did our 3rd and 4th dives towards our Advanced Open Water certification - a deep dive and underwater navigation. Yesterday we did a drift dive and peak performance buoyancy. Tomorrow we're going to do a night dive for fun, then on Sunday we'll do our last of the required dives, a wreck dive with penetration into the structure, and a fun dive to shark cave. Finally, sharks! There's tons of life out there but we haven't been lucky enough to see turtles or rays yet. I'll feel fine once I at least see a handful of sharks, and shark cave should do the trick.

Jason is not the best dive buddy at times (especially with navigating) and I'm totally smoking him on all the tasks, but that's ok. He loves me anyway :)

There's no wireless here so I might not post again until we get to Hong Kong. I don't like using Jason's midget computer. Please continue to keep us in your prayers though. We are safe - I promise, Freda - but there is still a lot that can go wrong and we want to be smart travelers.

On another note, I learned that a moment of silence was held for my dad at a recent conference in Texas that deals with public employee retirement systems. I found that really touching. He didn't really let any of us know much about his work world, what a mentor he was to his colleagues, or the impact his work had so it's nice to learn that other people respected him and are taking time to remember him. We recently put up a website in his honor so people can write memories they have of him and learn a little about him. Feel free to visit it: www.russbjorkman.com