I enjoy funny signs. To be clear, I’ve been sober for 979 days, so I’m not “ship faced” myself, but I can still appreciate the humor. There were many a scuba dive that I went out sober and came back hammered (rum drinks post scuba dives, of course). Today there wasn’t any alcohol on the boat to speak of — just the funny sign.

*Is an “aquaholic” an obsessive scuba diver? Maybe I am one …*

I’m so glad that Elena, Violet and I are all open water certified scuba divers. Despite the two hour boat ride to get to Racha Yai Island, it was well worth the wait. We were able to check out a sunken wreck along with newly developed coral reefs.

*NOT me, but accurate picture of the wreck we saw today*

It’s also important to mention, and I can’t stress this enough, that we saw: (1) A turtle eating under a big chunk of coral, (2) three cuttlefish that turned neon colors as they swam away, (3) moray eels, (4) tomato clownfish and (5) all sorts of fish local to Thailand.

The sea life in Thailand is doing much better than I had anticipated. So much of the underwater world has been bleached and dead that I almost stopped scuba diving there for awhile as it was too sad and depressing. When Elena and I first started some 30+ years ago the colors were off the chart bright and stunning. Now it’s rare to see bright colors underwater — beautiful to be sure, but rare in most cases.

*Elena and I are still happy to scuba dive together after 25+ years …*

*…and Violet is happy to join us on these scuba adventures too!*

The thing is, in order to get going on this trip, we had to get up at the crack of 6am. I know, can you believe it? That’s a full hour earlier than what Elena and I slept in yesterday and 9 hours earlier for Violet. Yep, that’s right, 9 hours earlier than yesterday. You know what that means?

*Remember when you could sleep ANYWHERE in ANY POSITION?!?*

I’m SO jealous. I wish I could do that. Sleeping vertically is a super power as far as I’m concerned. Sure, I enjoy my coffee and I have come to terms with my caffeine addiction. Perhaps one day when I’m no longer highly caffeinated, I can do what Violet does, but for now I will look on awestruck. This is amazing to me. I am in awe.

*Our family picture before we drop into our gear and into the ocean*

I should mention that we really enjoyed the group we worked with called Aloha Diving. We picked them as they were relatively close to where we are staying in Rawai Beach, and they had availability for when we wanted to venture out. They also had a number of positive reviews on Google (which helps boost confidence). This is the owner:

*Hajnal, the owner of Aloha Diving, giving a safety briefing*

I still think that the Carmody’s look great in orange. These life jackets are definitely our team color (see related post). There’s something that brings out the best in us when we are wearing bright orange. Not the prison jumpsuit variety, mind you, just the life jack variety.

So, a beautiful day out on the water again. A few pictures from the boat the wrap up this post. The main thing is the “I could get used to this” feeling as Elena and I were slowing leaving port this morning and slowly heading to our dive site about two hours away on a remote island. “I could get used to Thailand if we could just figure out the long flight from New York part.”

I know. Me too. It’s really beautiful out here. Other than the very, very long flight to get here, once we’ve found our way here everything else seems to work itself out. It’s truly a lovely place to exist in the world.