Birthday events and a colour-changing cuttlefish
Yes - it’s official. I am one year older and supposedly wiser (although the latter is certainly up for debate). On Saturday I became 26 years old and am feeling every year of it! Especially when I teach my students (15-19 years old) I feel like an ojiisan (meaning old man in Japanese). They are all so full of life… well except when the odd one or 2 fall asleep in my class, but I soon wake them up.
To celebrate my birthday I had intended to go out on a dive boat to the Keramas on Saturday, but strong winds and rough seas on Friday turned me & Brian against the idea. So instead we went to the Kanna Thalasso Okinawa bath house and spa with a couple of our friends. The spa is up near Ginoza and Nago, but is well worth scooting up the Expressway for. From massaging water jets, to lemongrass herbal baths and saunas, and even a swimming pool and water slide for the kids (and the kid in you). There are also a couple of outdoor baths which were great to get into, as the sun was out and you could look over the beach and to the flat ocean on the east side of Okinawa. We spent a good few hours there and came out feeling totally relaxed. Headed back down to Chatan for some lunch at Obbligato before coming home and relaxing for the rest of the day. I was pretty worn out in the evening after a couple of very late nights on Thursday and Friday. On Friday night I elected to move around the furniture around in my apartment, and it ended up taking much much longer than I’d anticipated. This was mainly to do with the fact that I decided to do a big clear-out of old stuff too - was very liberating to do that:)
Yesterday I had a bit of a lie in (got up at 7:30am which is the longest lie-in I’ve had in about 3 weeks). Saying that though, I quite like getting up early as I’ve got the whole day to spend doing what I want. A lot of people will go out drinking on the weekend and only get up at around midday, then will be hungover until mid-afternoon. Most of the day is gone then and they’ve done nothing. On a normal weekend, I’ll have finished 2 dives and completed logbooks & had coffee by 12:30, which gives me the entire afternoon to do what I want. Got up though to find the wind had dropped completely, the sun was out and conditions were ideal for diving. We headed to Sunabe and got right in. Now the visbility was great with the sun being a little higher in the sky than usual when we dive, but I have to admit that the water felt chilly. It was 20C, which is the coldest it’s been this year, but towards the end of the second dive I started to feel quite cold, and if our air consumption hadn’t limited our dive, then the cold would have forced me in a few minutes later. Saying that, we had a couple of relatively long dives, and we saw a great cuttlefish. It was inking a little, colour changing and just going about its business. I’m sure it didn’t see us or wasn’t threatened by us so we dropped to the bottom and watched it from a distance. They really are strange creatures (and are molluscs and not fish, contrary to their namesake) and always remind me of The Predator when I see them. Seeing them change colour before your eyes is pretty amazing though, and they do that as a means of communication between cuttlefish or to disguise themselves for a predator. It also inked a little from the front, before slowly turning and swimming away, parallel to us. That alone made the dive worthwhile. A picture of a cuttlefish is below, but it’s not the one we saw yesterday.
And that’s about my weekend summed up. I think the cold water during those dives took its toll on my body, as I was shattered by the early evening and was in bed by about 10pm last night. Feel much refreshed now though and ready to take the world on again this week. More news and reports will follow later in the week, but until then take care and dive safely.
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Congratulations Dave, happy birthday!
Thank you. Much appreciated! Let’s hope this coming year is as successful as the last 12 months have been:)
Well, maybe you need to plan a trip to Thailand again (innocent whistling graemlin is in place here).
Well the plans are in place; it’s just a case of when the airlines travelling from Japan during Golden Week make their prices available that I sort things out. Hopefully that will be in the next couple of weeks.