Back home now and ready to get caught up on the trip… finally! I have just a few more activities to cover. I’ve been surprisingly tired. We’ve been taking this day just to basically recover, and my having PMS doesn’t help cuz that always makes me more tired. And hungrier. I had 5 bagel bites and was still hungry. Scarfed down a bowl of ice cream. Still hungry. Ate a hot dog since Tom got the only kind I like, which he rarely gets cuz they’re kind of greasy and expensive. Still a little hungry, but fine. I’ll just live with it.

On Sunday we stopped at Atlantis Submarines and found they had plenty of room for us to book a trip. They can fit up to 48 people per trip and there are no bathrooms in the submarine so it’s best to go on an empty bladder. Being Superbowl Sunday, they had plenty of open seats.

I thought the dive site was at the docks where Trilogy, the catamaran boats, as well as others, take off from. However, we had to take a little shuttle boat out to the actual dive site. It was about a 10-minute ride and they went faster than the catamaran did, at what I’m guessing was 40 MPH, whatever that comes out to in knots.

They gave us free postcards which they paid the postage for and so I decided to send one to Andy.

Since they did a dive before us we got to see the submarine emerge from the water. It was way cool! I got pics of it coming up as well as going back down with the next batch of passengers after our ride. Only the very top of it emerges above the water. The viewports remain underwater.

The inside of the sub is about as long as a bus but narrower. There are no isles you can walk up and down and people sit wedged in close and pretty much back-to-back. One row faces the viewports on the starboard side, and one faces the port side. There are two ways down into the sub and each one goes a different direction. If you go down from the left you sit on the port side and if you go down on the right you sit on the starboard side like we did.

So down we went to the ocean floor! Our deepest point was at 130 feet and the guy leading the tour and explaining the types of fish and the various things we were seeing, said to kiss our lovers as it would literally be the “deepest” kiss ever, haha.

Anyway, the guy explained how different colors change at different depths. The first one you lose is red. That becomes purple at 30 feet. Bright colors appear to glow, he said, and I looked at my bright, neon nails and sure enough, they did appear to glow.

I was surprised natural sunlight reached down to where we were going. He said you have to go to 600 feet before you lose all sunlight. He also said that coral only grows a quarter of an inch a year.

The viewports are magnified by 25% and so things appeared bigger and closer than they actually were.

Throughout the ride, we saw an old ancient anchor and a couple of cement blocks. The most fascinating part of the voyage, even more so than the fish, was the sunken ship! It was one they actually sunk themselves. It was an old leaky ship they bought for just a buck. But it costs a few grand in permits and all that shit. They sunk it for fish to play in back in ’05. It now has coral building upon it, of course, and there’s a hanging chain, which gives them a sense of what the current is like, even though most of the motion is at the surface.

So up we went and I watched the ocean floor fall away. Then he reached up, turned a small wheel and opened the hatch. Up the ladder we climbed where we then took pics of it submerging before being shuttled back to the harbor.