This morning we were moored at Tuna Alley. It's a coral ridge that starts at about 45 feet and slopes off to over 100. There were a number of channels through the coral, and some swim throughs as well. For the first dive we skipped the camera, since the sun was low and it would let us check out the good photo ops. Right after our descent we finished up a navigation exercise with Donna, then we were on our own to explore. The visibility was great, probably 80+ feet. With almost no current we had a very nice leisurely dive. We saw a big turtle eating a barrel sponge, along with lots of barracuda.

After a little over an hour on the surface we hopped back in with the camera, this time with the flash. Even though it was daytime, Randy wanted to try it to see if it would bring back some of the reds that the sea water filters out, and it did. We had lots of fun in the narrow channels between the coral heads. It was really a great site.

During lunch the boat moved to our final location, Victory Reef. It was between 45 and 80 feet deep, with similar features to our last site. We knew it would be our last dive, since you're not supposed to dive within 24 hours of flying. It turned out to be a great dive as we saw a reef shark (Rick was very excited) as well as a juvenile spotted drum, which is a tiny little black and white striped fish with long thin fins above and below. What a great dive to end the week on!

Back on board we settled up our account for the week and picked up a T-shirt as a souvenir. Then Randy worked on the last of the pictures to have them ready to show people that evening. Ron was also working on his pictures; he had taken some awesome pictures during the week and was also putting together a slide show. Our final dinner was topped off with some amazing chocolate covered brownies. After dinner everyone went up on the top deck and traded stories about the week. We put the laptop out with a slide show of the weeks pictures which everyone seemed to enjoy. It was great to spend more time with the other passengers, we met some really nice people on the trip and they all made us feel very much at home, even though we were the rookie divers on the trip. They made our first liveaboard a great experience! Around 10pm we went back to our cabin to pack since we'd have to go through customs in the morning.

Saturday morning we waited for immigration and customs to finish, them said our goodbyes to the other passengers. We had all traded contact info so we could stay in touch. The van dropped us at the Nekton office and a while later Randy's Mom and her husband Jerry picked us up. They had driven down from Vero beach to spend the day with us. We went to a nice restaurant in Fort Lauderdale for breakfast, then took the Water Taxi for a ride through the area multi-million dollar homes. Afterwards we had lunch and recounted stories from the trip and heard about their new house. It was great to get to see them; can't wait to get back to Florida at Christmas time.

Our flight home was relatively uneventful, except for the eight policemen waiting at the gate when they opened the door! It turned out that a passenger had been very unruly during the flight, and they were there to take him away! We were up in front and unaware of the whole thing!

Our second flight from L.A. was nice and short and by 10:30pm we were back at home. What a fantastic trip it had been. We've definitely been 'bitten' by the scuba bug, we've already been talking about when our next diving trip will take us...