Major Update on Life

Hello!  We have lots of fun things to blog about this time including spear fishing, youth fellowship, nearly burning down the school, dolphins, sharks, volleyball and rainbows.  We have had a good but busy last few days as the 1st quarter at school ended on Saturday.  Hard to believe 1/4 of the school year is done already.  Still feels like we just got here sometimes and time is going by fast!

We started leading the high school youth fellowship at the church here and have really enjoyed that.  We have enjoyed the kids and we feel like it is going really well.  We do it on Monday nights, with 3 weeks on and then 1 week off.    We are glad to be able to be a part of it!  

This week there was some extra excitement in Matt's 1st period class.  His room smelled bad when he got there in the morning because he had forgotten to clean up a lab that involved eggs.  So he put a candle on a burner to melt the candle and mask the smell.  Well the burner was up to hot and broke the candle and the wax spilled out and started on fire.  Before he got the burner out of the room and vented out the smoke the fire alarms were going off and the entire school had to be evacuated. The fire department came and it was very embarrassing, but students and people around the island like calling him fire chief when they see him around now.  

Also, volleyball season is starting up which will keep us busy.  Mindi is coaching the 9th grade team (Matt is helping) and we are playing on our own team in the rec league as well.  This will be a lot of fun with our first game tomorrow, but we are learning how out of shape we are!  

We went out spearfishing again this weekend and had a lot of fun.  A couple things were pretty awesome, the first happened just after we started fishing.  We heard some high pitched squeals in the water and found ourselves swimming right alongside a pod of dolphins.  There were probably 50-100 of them just swimming and jumping in and out of the water about 50 feet from us.  We had been hoping to see some dolphins since we got here, but to see them for the first time swimming around us was awesome!!!!  We were pretty shocked and we just sat there in awe for a while as they swam past us.  

Then after we had been fishing for awhile Matt shot and actually hit a fish for the first time!  He was pretty excited about that!  The picture above shows him trying to take aim at one of the fish.  I don't know who was more surprised, the fish or Matt for actually hitting it!!  Either way we are going to grill it up today or tomorrow sometime!

 Here is Matt proudly displaying his surgeon fish.  It was all black until it turned this striped pattern in the picture when he hit it with the spear.  During the spear fishing trip we also had a giant manta ray swim right up next to us and we saw a lot of sharks!!!  Sometimes we thought there were more sharks than anything else, and we had to move spots once because there were to many sharks and at the end we had to get out because the sharks were starting to become to "ornery," as the more experienced fishermen call them when they won't swim away.  These are the sharks that are actually dangerous..... Mindi was so frightened since you know they could have eaten her! Matt didn't think there was anything to be afraid of....But that is a man speaking! As we were boating home from the spearfishing it was raining really hard in the distance, which created one of the best rainbows we have ever seen.  It literally looked like it was coming out of the water just a little ways away.  It was pretty awesome! It seriously seemed like that was the closest we have ever been to a rainbow!

We got another fun scuba dive in that was highlighted by this sleeping blacktip reef shark.  It just kind of sat there on the bottom of the sand and let us swim around it and look at it.  

We went and ate out by the sunset one night and took a few pictures on the end of the island.  So here we are after getting takeout from one of the island's finest restaurants (subway).

A few other things:  Happy Birthday to Lynn Gerber!  Way to go dad!  Remember, age is just a number!

Sandy and Cal booked flights out here, Matt's uncle and aunt are going to come  visit and Lynn and Sue are going to be here in about 6 weeks!  We couldn't be more excited for all of them to come!!!!

We love and miss you all so very much!

Matt and Mindi

Scuba Diving

Here are few pictures from our most recent scuba dive.  This was a walk in dive off the Northpoint of the island into the lagoon.  When we were walking in there were some clouds building up and while we were under water it poured very hard and we could see all the drops coming down on the surface of the water.  Luckily we didn't get soaked by the rain while we were diving!  When we came back up, the storm had passed and we had a great time diving.

Here is Mindi in about 40 feet of water

This is looking up the reef after we went over the first drop off, which drops from 10 feet to about 40 feet 

Here is Matt posing in front of a coral head

This little puffer fish wanted its picture taken!  These things are pretty common and they swim around like a fish pushing around a baseball.  We haven't seen any puff up yet, but they are weird fish to watch swim around because they are slow and clumsy.  

School and Spearfishing

Here are some pictures of our classrooms (where we spend most of our time), and a picture from Matt's spearfishing trip.

Here is what students see when they walk into Mindi's room.  

This is what the class looks like from Mindi's podium.  From here she has a great vantage point to keep an eye on all 10 of the students in her biggest class!

Once a week one of her students has to select a place in the world to present a short "travel guide" about the location.  They usually make some food that would be traditional to the place and the class spends a few minutes learning about different places in the world. They map where they have been on this bulletin board.  Also, Mindi keeps track of birthdays on the calenders and they celebrate them! (thanks, Carla)  The students really like it. 

On this bulletin board students have to present a world or U.S. news story to the class.  On the red board her students get see pictures of their teacher when she was in school and growing up.  

 This is my classroom from the front door.  The walls are all painted like the ocean with dolphins and turtles and marlin and fish everywhere.  The tables don't move around, so this is the way it must stay.  I like it for the most part.  The huskers have one of the bulletin boards up front and we have a pick the score contest every week.  There is no football here, so often the score predictions are something like 89-58 or 19-4 or something like that.  Might have been well served to avoid a pick the score game this last weekend.

This is a picture I took when spearfishing last weekend.  Spearfishing was a ton of fun and something we hope to do again.  What you do is you snorkel around until you see the type of fish you are hunting, like grouper.  Then you have dive down about 30 feet to where they are hiding in the coral below.  You have to have enough breath to steady yourself, wait for it to stop moving, shoot it and then pull it in.  That is where it gets tricky.  Because the moment the fish is hit by the spear it starts bleeding and vibrating like crazy, which attracts the sharks.  And the sharks will literally take the fish from you.  So you have to get the fish pulled in against your body because the sharks don't want anything to do with you, they just want the fish.  When this guy, another teacher, shot the black fish at the top of the picture i was suppose to watch for sharks and drive them off if they were getting too close.  When he got to the surface one followed him up and was about 6 feet away from me.  I kicked my fins at it and it swam off, but that was pretty exciting.  I had 4 shots at groupers, and missed every single time.  It didn't do me much good to scream in anger 30 feet under water though.