Antigua has continued to grow since the last time we were here. There are a lot of great places to eat. After a long trip to get here, we needed to eat (and drink). Before we could go off wandering around town, we needed to get settled at the house we rented to be our home base for the next few weeks. We toured the property, met the gardener and the maid, and decided who would stay in which room. Let me just say, this place is fantastic. We knew it would be nice, but it’s even nicer than the VRBO listing made it look. This is going to be a great trip. ...

Our layover in Los Angeles was just over five hours. That’s a long time to sit in uncomfortable chairs in a small terminal where almost everything was closed for the evening. At some point Brett and I talked about what time we thought we would be in Antigua in the morning. We were scheduled to land in Guatemala City around 6:00 in the morning. We thought that would probably be early enough that traffic wouldn’t be bad yet. We knew it would take some time to clear customs, especially with needing to verify every passenger held a recent negative test for covid, etc. We thought we would probably be leaving the airport by 7:00 and be in Antigua (20 miles away) by 7:45 or 8:00 – just in time for breakfast. We thought that was a fairly conservative estimate. We thought we had it all figured out. ...

Flying first class on Delta isn’t what it used to be. A lot of that is because of the coronavirus, but a lot of it is because of cost-saving due to the pandemic. Gone are the drinks to drink as the rest of the plane boards. Gone are the warm towels. The seats are still spacious and soft, but that’s about the only thing that’s the same. Not only were we never asked what we wanted to drink, but there were no drinks at all. Instead, they gave us a ziploc bag with goldfish crackers and a 4 ounce bottle of water. We were disappointed, but I think Charmaine was really upset. If I read her reaction correctly, I think she was somewhat upset that we had spent the money (miles) to fly first class only to have this extremely downgraded experience. Her entertainment system was broken, so she couldn’t watch anything. She fought with her entertainment system for an hour or more and seemed so frustrated that she almost seemed to be holding back tears. We had the flight attendants reboot the system and it eventually started working, but it was definitely not a great experience. ...

Yesterday was originally going to be our last day diving on this trip, but after getting skunked at Molokini Crater earlier in the week, Charmaine scheduled us to hit the crater this morning. We were pretty excited for that after seeing how amazing the visibility was out there yesterday. We checked in at the shop and walked our stuff down to the dock where Captain Levi was directing traffic. The boat going to Molokini was packed full and the boat going to Lanai for a drift dive was half empty. Levi suggested we would have a better time doing the Lanai drift than going to Molokini again. The crater is very popular and crowded for a reason. But he said the Lanai drift dive is special. We looked around and saw the old dude that puked all over the place was on the boat to Molokini and saw how much room there was on the Lanai boat and saw that the dive crew going to Lanai were all people we already liked (and Captain Dave was going to be diving with one of the groups today), so we had Captain Levi call the shop and switch us over. We’ll always be glad we made that switch. At the time there was a bit of joking about us being the good luck charm that got the manta, the dolphins, and the whale the day before. We even suggested Mitch switch boats as a joke… he had to work the Molokini charter because they needed as many crew as they could get with a boat that full. ...

Getting skunked a second day in a row was upsetting. Worse, the dive we had originally scheduled for today is the dive we wound up doing yesterday – Mala Pier. I wouldn’t be too sad about diving there again, especially since it was our best dive of the trip, but Charmaine went in to the dive shop and changed some things around so we could go to Molokini today. It’s not the world-famous Molokini Crater, but it’s still Molokini. We signed ourselves up to do two drift dives at Molokini. The dive shop requires every diver have a flashlight and safety sausage, so I got to buy a safety sausage. Charmaine already had one (and a dive knife). ...

Remember that time we almost dove Second Cathedral on Lana’i? People are starting to wonder if we are bad luck. Once again, we braved the rough water and parked our boat at our desired dive site, only to be turned away and have to dive somewhere else. This time it was the Molokini crater. We arrived after a fairly easy crossing, to find only 2 boats there. That’s very unusual. It’s the most visited spot in all of Hawaii, getting more visitors per year than the USS Arizona. The two boats were pulling their divers back and heading out. The forecast had changed and they now expected the wind to really pick up soon, so everyone was getting out of there before it got ugly. We decided to dive some spots closer to Lahaina. The first site was called Jabberwocky. ...

The rain has been pounding and the wind has been howling since we landed on Maui, but that doesn’t have a huge effect on conditions below the surface. We were all set to dive Second Cathedral on the south side of Lanai today. We braved the rough crossing in this weather, tied off, and dropped the first group of divers. Then we realized the boat was drifting. The mooring ball had severed its rope and we were no longer tied to anything. We tried recalling the first group of divers, but they didn’t hear us, probably because we had drifted too far from where we dropped them before attempting to recall them. So we waited while they completed their dive. We didn’t get to see the cathedral. ...

Today was the last day of diving this trip. Nobody was sure what the name of the dives were, because it’s a holiday weekend and we were lucky just to get moored on a ball somewhere along Molasses Reef. The reality is that all the dives are pretty close to each other and you can be moored above one spot, but wind up doing one or two of the spots right next to it. So both dives today were somewhere on Molasses reef, but they probably didn’t follow any officially named dives. We just went were we could be a little further away from all the other divers. ...

It’s a holiday weekend. All the boats are packed. Ours was no exception. We had 20 divers, 4 dive masters, and even a couple snorkelers on board. We were among the first to board and we got the premium seats close to the back. We also managed to get the best guide on the boat. If only I remembered his name so I could write it here. Unfortunately, I am terrible with names and his is now lost. But he had a plan to make sure we were the first group in the water at each dive location and it worked. There were a ton of boats at each location, so our dive master took us in a slightly different direction than all the other groups and it made all the difference. ...

Brett and Jess arrived yesterday and joined us on our dives today. It was so calm yesterday and I hoped it would be as good today, so they could enjoy some of this sweetness. It was. And they did. Both of our dives were along Molasses Reef today. Our first spot was at a place they call Ryan’s Beach. I suspect it has another name, because when they said it, the rest of the crew laughed. It’s probably something like Valerie’s Beach, but I can’t seem to look it up anywhere. ...