January 6 – Snorkeling off Isla de la Plata

Pam/ January 7, 2012/ Travel

After the hike on Isla de la Plata, the guides got us back on the boat and served us lunch: watermelon, a slice of pineapple, two hot dog sized sandwiches (one tuna salad, the other ham and cheese), served with Coke. We ate while the boat moved to the snorkeling area.

Without speaking Spanish I missed all the description. Medusa came up in our guides announcement … I caught that, but I’m not sure what else he said. A couple of the other tourists were kind enough to clue me in when they thought I should be. Cecelia, a young woman with her mother, and Yamil, a man in his mid-thirties who studied in NYC for three years, both helped me out.
The water was cool and the fish stunning. I wore a life vest so really all I had to do was put my face in the water. It took me three times to get the mask on right and when I did, I just floated and watched. There were big fish, little fish, blue fish, yellow fish. (Dr. Seuss would do a better job, I’m sure.) There were fish with vertical black stripes and some with both yellow and blue. There was one really weird looking long skinny fish that I literally couldn’t make heads or tails of. As I floated along, I wondered if that’s where the phrase came from … “I can’t make out which is the head or the tail of that fish”.

I didn’t see the thing that stung me. It felt like a little jolt of electricity on my forearm. And then it happened again. It was time to swim back to the boat, which was OK with me. I wasn’t the only one who got stung. One of the couples from Argentina had mucho welts on their legs and arms. Mine are just small mosquito sized bites, although I have a rash on my chest tonight. I don’t know if that’s related or not.

Bites/stings aside, I love snorkeling. This is the third time I’ve done it and every time I think “I need to move somewhere I can snorkel every day!” When I got back into the boat I exclaimed “That was awesome” and nobody said anything. I’d been quiet all day so either they were surprised to hear my enthusiasm or just didn’t know how to respond to my English spoken outburst.