Diving: The Needle/Third Encounter and Diamond Rock! and Sunset from Booby Hill

Ok so the only photographs I have that I can include in a legit update are from Monday - first I went diving in the morning. It was my favorite day of diving, even though the visibility wasn't great. Then that evening Bus and I made the trek down to Windwardside and then to an abandoned house on Booby Hill to watch the sun set over the mountain.

So this dive was me, a couple from Ft. Lauderdale who have dived alllll over the world, and an ex-stock broker from Wall Street who now works in a bank in Barbados! - haha she wanted to retire so her boss was like "hey how about a banking job in Barbados?!" so she took it because it's a place she can dive. She's a banker during the week and a dive master on the weekends. Pretty sweet deal if you ask me.

The first site was called Third Encounter - but it's really the starting pinnacle to get to The Needle, which is Saba's most famous dive site. Basically, you start swimming out into the blue, you can't see any kind of structure anywhere around you. It's pretty eerie because that's when sharks swim by :) We got to see a shark!!!! It was a Caribbean reef shark, and I was so excited. And I thought it was pretty big, and having the other [way more experienced] divers tell me they thought it was big confirmed it! Unfortunately I didn't get a photo because it was at the beginning of the dive and my camera wasn't ready yet. Fail.

So I stole this from the internet so you know what this type of shark looks like :)

It's very colorful here!

Cool anemone

This is kind of what The Needle looks like - it's a relatively narrow, underwater mountain that starts at about 230ft and peaks at 80ft under water. So cool. I couldn't get a good photo with the flash on (because of the particles in the water) so I turned it off - that's why it's very blue.

Eel at the top of The Needle

The next dive we did is called Diamond Rock. Below is a picture of Diamond Rock from above the water. You can also see it in the photos from Well's Bay. You see all the white?? Yeah that's not Diamond Dust, as they call it here - haha it's just bird poop. They must have decided that Diamond Rock sounds a lot better than Bird Poop Rock :)

I think this was my favorite dive of all, so far at least. It was SOOO colorful and full of life. Unfortunately my camera battery died at the beginning of the dive. Rather unfortunate. But oh well, I got to enjoy the dive without having to think about taking photos. I hope to do this one again when the fam gets here in July!!

I don't know why this turned blue, but I'm gonna leave it.

So hiking up Booby Hill, this is one view of St. Eustatius - a nearby island. Pretty cool.

This is just a cool shot of the cloud passing through. The peak of Mt. Scenery is almost always covered by a cloud. This is just a particularly cool photo because you can see the peak, but there is still a ring of the cloud around the mountain!

Sunset over the mountains :)

That's all I have for now! Bus and I are going to the beach again tomorrow (we're getting a ride this time haha) so hopefully I'll have some good photos to share!!