Five minute safety stop. (Hanging out at depth of 20 feet to allow any excess absorbed gasses to be released from my blood before the final ascent to the surface).
Mer doesn't like scuba diving (she has trouble equalizing the pressure in her ears) but she was excited to snorkel around the reef while we were diving.
RIP Weak Moment (A couple of years ago my dad realized that he probably wasn't "boating" enough to put up with all the shit that you have to do in order to own a boat and sold it.)
Around 8pm, a fire boat showed up and anchored near the barges. It was shooting off its water cannons and two of the streams were shooting red and blue water!
Our apartment in Stuytown has an amazing view of the East River just north of 14th Street - which is where they park the huge Macy's fireworks barge! A little after 7:30, the barges were pulled into place by tugboats!
Another shot of the cool rickety boats. The place totally looked like a shipyard from the movie-version of Popeye starring Robin Williams and Shelly Long. (Does anybody else remember that movie? It used to be on HBO ALL THE TIME when I was little. I think I watched it pretty much every single afternoon I stayed home sick).
Check out the gorgeous view of the water. While we were admiring the view, we noticed that there was a boat anchored in the water, and to the left of the boat was something coming up out of the water. We decided to climb down onto the rocks furthest out in the water to get a better look!
We walked around Long Beach for thirty minutes or so, but Meredith was feeling really crummy (just in case you couldn't tell from the face she's making in this photo...hahaha) and it looked like it was about to start pouring soon. So rather than risk having to do the long walk back over slippery rocks in a downpour, we opted to hire a longtail boat to take us back to the beach near our part of the island.
We woke up on Saturday and it was STILL RAINING! In fact, it had been raining for so long that when we opened the door and stepped out onto our porch, the beach had completely disappeared and the ocean was just a couple of inches shy of overcoming the walkway and flooding our hut!
The next day we were SO. HUNG. OVER. that we didn't really managed to get showered and out of the room until around 3pm! We decided to take it easy and hired a local guy to take us on a three hour longtail boat tour of the surrounding islands.
I got up super-early on Monday morning and sneaked out of the room without waking Meredith. By 8:30, I was already on a boat headed out for two dives. Here's the view as we pulled away from the island.
After we'd finished lunch, we went back out on the docks and we ended up striking up a conversation with one of our boat drivers. Which eventually led to him insisting that he take a picture...
The guy at our hostel highly recommended the tour of the lake and I took his word without asking him to go into too much detail about what we'd be doing on the tour. Around this time we'd be driving across the lake for almost an hour and we were starting to wonder if the whole tour was going to be spent on the boat.
After getting out of the truck, we stopped for a quick bathroom break and then hit the lake! Most of the other guests stayed under the boat's awning, but since Mer and I had slathered ourselves with sunblock, we decided to sit up on the bench on the very back of the boat and enjoy the sun and scenery.
The longtail boats are really fun. They're basically handmade boats with car engines strapped to the back that have been converted so that the drive shift turns a propeller.
Madinat Jumeirah is ridiculous even by Dubai's standards. It's a resort that takes up an entire kilometer of the coast and the entire thing is connected by man-made waterways. Here's the "water taxi" that showed up to take us from the lobby to the restaurant.
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