With the swell starting to come in I decided to take a second surf lesson to get some in ocean practice. Something that is different about surfing in the Maldives than it is on the East Coast is that they have what is known as reef surfing. Reef surfing is when waves break over a reef or coral sea beds. Because of this, we needed to be careful on how we fell off the surfboard (starfish pose), and have reef boots on so when we stood up we wouldn't scratch our feet on coral.
After a delicious but healthy breakfast of coconut quinoa pudding, I got my stuff together and headed to the dive shop. We did a bit of on-land practice before getting into our rash guards and reef boots. There were two instructors and three people taking lessons, the person who was put with me and my instructor (Josh) was, Ollie, the head of food and beverage for the resort! All of the staff get one day off a week and are encouraged to do activities, excursions or take advantage of the spa on their day off to relax and reinvigorate themselves. Once we were all ready to go and had all our gear we boarded the boat, and how exciting for me, we were taking the dragon boat out! That's what Jon and I had been calling this boat that we've been seeing throughout the week. It's gone out a few times before but we had no idea what it was being used for. Looking at it, it looks a lot like a viking boat, but I like the name dragon boat better so that's what we're sticking with.
It's a short boat ride to where we need to go, and we're so close to the resort you can still see some of the villas from where we are. When we arrive at our location Josh says okay, we're going to go upstairs to the top deck, throw our boards in and jump in after them. I'm sorry, Josh, but what? Yet, that is exactly what we did. He threw my surfboard off the top of the ship and then said to me, "ok Meg, jump in anywhere you want, except on top of the board". My first thought was what did I get myself into, my second thought was, Jon is going to be so jealous I'm jumping off the top of the dragon boat!
We swam over to the reef break and waited for some waves. A lot of what I was taught the other day during the lagoon lesson was put into practice, everything from turning while paddling to keeping my upper body upright and straight. I caught most of my waves the first half of the lesson. There were a few good waves in which I was able to ride them for a decent amount of time and started to learn to shift my weight to speed up, slow down and turn for a longer ride. The lesson was two hours long, and the worst part of surfing is having to paddle yourself back to your starting point. As the lesson continued on my exhaustion started to catch up with me and I was falling off more and more. One more good ride, and we were done for the day.
That afternoon Jon wanted to go snorkeling one more time to get a good image of a turtle. We've seen so many pop up in the mornings while we're having our coffee on the deck, we know they've been hanging around in the seagrass. I knew my shoulders were toast from that morning so I opted to watch from the villa.
As he swan out through the seagrass I could see him stop from time to time and just hover over a spot, knowing he was looking at something interesting. He came back a while later with a big grin on his face and said "look at what I got!" Sure enough, he had a perfect, clear, photo of a turtle in the seagrass.
As mentioned earlier, there are multiple marine biologists on property and each of them focuses on a different part of the marine life at Six Senses. What this also means is that they keep track and identify all the turtles they see as well as manta rays. Turtles have a different pattern on their face, similar to a human finger-print, while manta rays have different patterns on their belly. Jon sent the photo to the marine biologist on site for turtles to see if he could learn what the turtle's name is and more about him. Anticipation awaits!
