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