Justin didn't sleep well, so Crystal went fishing this morning while he slept.  She saw dolphins again, but way less than the day before.  Crystal did some fishing, and caught two barracudas and three other people's fishing lines.  Others on the boat caught some grouper and yellowtail and bonita and some other stuff.  Technical difficulties meant there was no video of what transpired, unfortunately.  Back at the lodge, breakfast was eggs, beans, and quesadillas.

This morning we left a little later for the whale sharks, maybe because the day before it took a while before we saw anything.  Claudia wasn't feeling up to it today, so it was just the four of us plus Gray and Rafa.  We went same route as day before, but we actually had to backtrack almost all the way back across the bay (so once across and then almost all the way back) before we spotted anything.  Today the sharks had no interest in swimming with us.  We'd get in and they'd immediately swim off.  These were mostly younger sharks that weren’t as big, weren’t as used to humans, and with more energy to swim away quickly. 

But we kept trying and trying, and even five seconds of viewing was worth it.  It did get monotonous to keep having to get back into the boat, taking off our mask, snorkel, and fins every time, just to put them right back on and hop into the water a couple minutes later – rinse, lather, repeat.  After an hour or so, Justin spotted one off in the distance, further from the couple that were giving us fits.  This one was a bit more timid, and Justin was able to finally stay with him.  Crystal was able to hop in as well after the boat reconnoitered.  It could have been 3 minutes or 30 minutes, and we would have believed either.  [After looking at the time stamps on the pictures and video, the swim was about 10 minutes.]  This long swim more than made up for all the frustrations earlier in the morning.

We saw some more dolphins coming back to resort, but again not so many.  We had a later lunch, some chicken mole.  Gray told us that everyone in Bahia had their own special mole recipe, and that everyone was somewhat secretive of what exactly went into theirs.  Our afternoon excursion was way out east, with Luis and Tomas (two of the other staff members) who were trolling for dorado (mahi mahi), plus Cynthia and Deanna.  As we trolled, the engine slowed down, so we just put on tunes on a waterproof speaker and enjoyed the weather and the sights.  Justin had been put in charge of music, and put in a long queue of eclectic stuff, not knowing what people might like.  We didn’t catch any dorado, but did manage to catch some other fish.

We got to a small bay and Rafa anchored the boat.  While we snorkeled around two small islands in the bay, Tomas and Luis and Gray caught scallops.  The coral was almost totally bleached, and most of the fish were camoflauged, but there were some cool things to see nonetheless.  There was one bright orange grouper, several colorful angelfish, and the dogfaced (or bullseye) puffer fish were super friendly.  It was actually somewhat disconcerting, because in our experience it is extremely rare for fish to swim up to you if you’re not holding fish food.  Crystal saw an octopus swimming around, and just before leaving Cynthia spotted a different one.  Tomas put in work to eventually wrestle it free from its hiding spot and bring it back to the boat.

On the way back, we were trolling again, and the music started up again.  About halfway back there was another massive pod of dolphins, perhaps the ones from the day before.  The pod was about 1000 feet wide, and probably close to that deep as well.  Today there were more acrobatics, particularly when Rafa revved the engine.  We were snaking through the pod and taking pictures and video, and no one ever shut off the music on the speaker.  So as we watched all these dolphins we heard Somewhere Over the Rainbow by Braddah Iz, Welcome to the Jungle by Guns and Roses, and Dancing Queen by Abba.  They all sort of fit in their own, very different, ways.

We eventually got back to the resort after a spectacular day, just in time for Happy Hour.  Grazia cut up some of the scallops and put them on the table with chips and guacamole and some other stuff, and we had to keep an eye on the table, because Francis – the resident cat – kept trying to take some scallops.  We hung around for a while, with Cynthia being the DJ this time around.  Dinner was an assortment of fish, with beef for Justin.  The grouper for Claudia was nowhere to be found, so we all just blamed Francis.  The dinner conversation basically revolved around us crapping all over the current administration and how embarrassing it was to leave the US while all this was going on.  It made us think of a line from one of the more recent Dave Chappelle specials where said something to the effect of “maybe all of us hating on this dumb motherfucker will be what unites us a country.”  Tonight, for one dinner, it united a bunch of strangers who had just met 48 hours prior.

After dinner, the two of us and Cynthia went out with Rafa and Gray onto the boat to take turns jumping into the black ocean.  Well, black until we jumped in, because the waters around the resort are full of bioluminescence.  Gray had showed us the night before right near the shoreline, and told us tonight it would be even better because there’d be no moon, so we should go out on the water.  Going out in the middle of the ocean in pitch black skies, after hours of drinking, to jump off a boat into the dark ocean, sounds like something both our moms would be extremely proud of.  Before we got on the boat, we told each other to tell our respective parents that we'd had a great couple of days if anything went awry.  But nothing went awry, it was awesome.  The boat’s wake glowed in the dark, sort of a yellow-green color.  Our bodies also caused a glow when we dove into the water and splashed around.  We took a shower after we got back, with now lukewarm water.  We were actually a bit cold from being in the ocean after dark, plus the shower.  It did not take us long at all to fall asleep.