Dive and marvel!

Today we have another excursion planned, we have booked a boat tour to the St. Anne Marine National Park! For this, we will be woken up by the 'nature alarm clock', at 6:30 the rain is pounding on our roof so hard that we are ripped out of our sweet dreams. Well, actually pure sunshine was forecasted for today, let's hope it will improve by the time our boat tour starts at 9:00 a.m.

On the way to the starting point of the tour, the harbor in Victoria, we are stuck in morning rush hour traffic - there is busy stop and go on the single-lane main road - but we are on vacation, so we take it easy. It takes us about 45 minutes for the short 20 km.

Arriving at the harbor, at least the rain has stopped, the sun is still scarce, but we are happy with that. Let's go out to sea, together with our local guide Ritval, who will choose the best underwater spots for us. Through the glass bottom of the boat, I spot a sea turtle in the middle of the trip, already the first highlight for us. The first stop is in the middle of the Marine National Park, where we are spoiled by a colorful variety of fish. Next, we go to a reef in front of Cerf Island, our personal highlight. Here, a coral restoration project is also carried out, and it has made great progress in the past two years. Even within the short period of time since our last vacation, we feel that the Seychellois underwater world has regenerated significantly. So we snorkel along the entire reef and are picked up by our boat again at the end of the coral road. We are particularly impressed by a kind of coral cage, where the colorful underwater plants show their magnificent colors (see photo). From here, we go to two more snorkeling spots, where we also discover a sea turtle in the seagrass. Unfortunately, these creatures are quite fast and so I mostly only see them from behind. Following Ritval's advice that the beautiful things of the underwater world are usually hidden below in the stone caves, I also dive deep from time to time and I am rewarded: I get to admire two lobsters in the depths. Once again, we are simply blown away, and the photos only give a small glimpse into all our shared experiences. And the weather also cooperated perfectly, just a few minutes after we arrived back at the harbor, it started raining heavily again, but we had a true weather guardian angel for our tour.

In the evening, as we experience the first real sunset of this vacation from the beach (despite clouds on the horizon, the sun finds its way through a small hole in the clouds - just for us), we look back on all these wonderful experiences.