Thursday morning we woke up, had breakfast and then got our dive briefing on a site called Thumbnail (some people later dubbed it "Hangnail"). Once the dive deck was open, people started going in the water. Contrary to the "slight" current that we had been told about, there appeared to be a fairly strong current going. Several people were talking about it as they came back out of the water. We had air tanks freshly filled with Nitrox, and the ship's engineer, Bobby, had gone over the verification of the mix in the tanks with us. Due to the current, we decided that we'd go out along the "granny" line, which runs from the back of the boat to the mooring line, where we'd descend. As we pulled our way along, there were a couple of people ahead of us who were having a hard time against the current. We pulled our way past them and started to descend.. Below us we could see a number of people holding onto the mooring line at the 15 foot level, doing their safety stop as they came back up. The odd part was that they were all horizontal and fluttering in the current! We decided that it was not worth the effort to descend, and aborted the dive. Our shortest dive to date.

Since the current was so strong, the captain moved the boat an extra time for the day, to a site called Hawksbill. It was about 40 feet deep with a few large coral heads. We saw some cool fish; a queen trigger, a spotted drum and a very large trumpet fish. The current was much less and it was a very pleasant dive. The boat moved again during lunch, this time to The Strip, a narrow band of coral about 200 feet long and 20 feet wide which was teeming with fish. We knew it would make a good night dive later on.

After lunch we put on some shoes (for the first time of the week!) and took a ride into port on the island of Bimini with Ron, Karyn and Allison. We walked around for a bit and stopped in at The Complete Angler, where Earnest Hemmingway spent a bunch of time. There wasn't much else to do there, it's a very small island. Back on board the Pilot we decided that it was late enough that we'd skip the afternoon dive and wait for the night dive. A bit after 8pm we jumped into the water and descended to The Strip. We saw a bunch of creatures, including some big crabs a huge barracuda. Rick saw the tips of an octopus' tentacles in a hole in coral head, but try as he might, it wouldn't come out, oh well...

Back on deck we talked to Donna about finishing our Advanced Open Water certification with her, since we'd had some scheduling issues with Matt. After a quick check with the captain, it was all set. She went over the last of our book work with us and we were set for one last water task in the morning.

Back down in the salon we broke out the vodka with Ron and John and talked and joked until about 11pm. Tired and slightly tipsy, we made our way back to our cabin and went soundly to sleep.