Hurricane Rina and much more

You all are probably confused on why I´m updating on a Thursday. Well, let me break it down for you. Last night we all stayed in a hotel in one of the little towns waiting for the storm to pass. Before we arrived in Casitas, we packed all of our belongings into the dive shop, put the boats on shore, borded up anything that could fly away, etc. The waves passed the lagoon were enormous, but so gorgeous. After we arrived in town, we settled in our hotel rooms, ate, and pretty much chilled the rest of the evening. The hurricane is currently downgraded back to category 1 and is now just a tropical storm. Sounds scary but basically all that I have noticed was a lot of wind, some rain (although it apparently rained heavily early in the morning) and an increase in humidity. Not exactly what I was imagining for a hurricane but I´m happy this is all we got. We´re leaving for Punta Gruesa in a couple hours, where we have to unpack everything that we did yesterday. Bust. But oh well, it was good to leave for a little bit and have a REAL bed and a hot shower. We´re going to have a full day tomorrow and half day on saturday, so hopefully I´ll be able to talk to some of you saturday afternoon/sunday. We´re trying to see if we can do something for the Day of the Dead. I don´t really know what they do here for it, but either way I want to be apart of it.


Other then the random hurricane warning and evacuation, life on base has been good. Still enjoying myself to the fullest. Although, October 24 made for the best day of my life. I dove first wave with 3 other volunteers and one of the staff members. And as we were going through our PI (point intercept invertebrate species list) IDing different organisms we heard sonar. And then the boat moving around above us. We knew that dolphins were near us. We all were looking around in circles, but the visibility wasn´t too good so it was hard to see where they were. Finally, the lighting was just right and I saw my first wild dolphin. Even better was the fact that I was scuba diving while seeing it. I saw two more while we were down there, and we basically cut the dive short with what we were doing and were looking for dolphins. It was mezmerizing watching them. I started screaming underwater and even got a little teary eyed in my mask. It was so surreal. After we surfaced, we quickly took off our scuba gear and put our snorkels in. We met up with the other boat, who were already in the water waiting for the dolphins. The two boats were circling all of us, creating a wake that the dolphins like to play in. We waited for about 10 minutes and finally the dolphins came back to us. They were really active and playful with us. It was so much fun just swimming with them. There were six of them that hung out with us, but apparently there were 10 others hanging around the boat. We saw bottlenose and spotted dolphins. It was incredible, and I still can´t believe it happened!