Under da sea!

Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink.

Sean and I have had the pleasure of going scuba diving twice in the last six weeks and we have seen incredible sea creatures on both occasions!

Our first scuba experience was as follows: Sean, Nick and I went with an instructor-the actual instruction was a two minute briefing and in we went-to explore the bottom.

Tropical fish like the ones in this photo were everywhere!
Trumpet fish, clown fish, and dozens that I don't know the name of. We also saw blowfish (but no Hootie) with spines and some without.

I saw a strange fluttery looking fish that oddly enough neither Sean nor Nick had seen. It turns out it was a squid! When they swim along they keep all of their tentacles together so they look like an elongated fish from far away. Upon closer inspection I could see the "fluttery" part was a translucent sack over the head. Who woulda thunk it!?

On a sadder and somewhat dim-witted note.....
Mishap 1: I kicked a sea urchin. And not one of those adorable roundish sea urchins that you sometimes see washed up on the shore of the Maritimes, no! An extremely sharp-spined black sea urchin (see left)
that possesses a very eerie, vibrant blue glow in the centre.

Mishap 2: I had a lot of pain in my ears during the dive and afterwards because I hadn't understood our instructors mime-directions of how to pop your ears. I thought he meant to only pinch your nose (I missed the blowing part of his demonstration) and somehow this would help the pressure in your ears. I know, not one of my more brilliant moments, but I was a little nervous, ok? Well, needless to say my technique wasn't very effective, but after we came up I was correctly informed and all set for our next trip out.

Round two!

We added one more person to our motley crew and headed back to the Hadramout Hotel for another invasion of the Arabian Sea.
This time we were taken out along a coral reef which was teeming with fish of all colours, big and small. I was in the lead with Mohammed (our patient instructor) as he had seen from our last excursion the impressive level of my incompetence in the water. The others followed behind as we saw more than we knew existed. Although it was a little embarassing that I was so inept at scuba diving it did allow me the priviledge of having a guided tour with an eight-year veteran in these waters.















We saw blue-spotted stingrays, different varieties of tropical fish, larger versions of the ones previously seen, crabs , sea cucumbers, starfish, anemonae, stonefish (very hard to spot-but not for me thanks to my guide!) and Sean even saw a red octopus!

















All this for $60 each! Welcome to Yemen everybody.

Disclaimer: These photos are not our own, but we saw all of the creatures in them very close up. The picture of Sean and I with the starfish and sea cucumber is from a previous snorkeling adventure in the same spot.