We left early this morning-around 8:00. We headed for North Gallows where we saw our first manatee of the day. Caryn got in the water to try to follow him but was unsuccessful. After taking our data measurements, we got in the water to snorkel along the reef.

Debbie and I paired up and headed a bit north while the rest of the group went south with Landy. After looking around a bit, we turned to head south and join the rest. I heard Caryn yelling, so I popped my head up from the water. She yelled that a manatee was heading our way and to just float like a dead man. During our initial briefing, Caryn had warned, that in extremely rare cases, a manatee will come upon a group when volunteers are in the water. She taught us that the best thing to do was to not move, not yell out what we were seeing, just to stay quiet. Any noise could spook the manatee and we'd lose our opportunity to see a manatee close up. So, we floated.

Out of the distance came the manatee. He swam right up to us, stopping about 20 feet away. He looked at us, turned a bit, looked at us again, and then turned and swam away. It felt like time was in slow-motion.

Before leaving for Belize, I had purchased a disposable underwater camera. Of all the times I was in the water, I only had it with me twice. This happened to be one of the two times. So, as the manatee approached and swam near us, I carefully, and quietly as humanly possible, snapped a half-dozen pictures. I took pictures of his face, his body, and remembering what I'd read in Hartman's book, I took a couple of pictures of his paddle in hopes it would help in identification. He was about 8 feet long and darkish gray with a darker patch on his back. There were some chunks missing out of his paddle.

After he'd gone, Debbie and I swam back to the boat and excitedly described what we'd seen to Caryn. In the time it took for us to swim to the boat-all of about 3 minutes-the details were already starting to fade. Hopefully, all the pictures will turn out.

Caryn told us it was as if something we were doing had attracted the manatee. Whether it was our splashing, our breathing, or something else, she couldn't say, but the manatee had made a beeline straight for us. Once he'd satisfied his curiosity, he simply swam off into the distance.

After the excitement at North Gallows, we left for South Gallows. We didn't see any manatees there, but we did get to snorkel along the reef for about an hour. It's a pleasure to watch Landy "snorkel." First, he doesn't use a snorkel. Just a mask and some fins are all the equipment he uses. He'll take a deep breath and dive down, smiling the whole time so you can see his teeth, and swim around and point things out to us. At one point, he dove easily 25-30 feet to the bottom to look for lobsters among the coral. I tried to dive down that deep, but had to turn around and frantically scramble for the surface before I made it more than 20 feet.

We then headed into the Bogues where we met an interesting fisherman named E-Banks. He'd been fishing in his dory. He told us stories about manatees eating lobsters from his trap, and that he knew that they had a resting hole around the corner. Caryn was a bit suspicious about both statements, but we had a good long conversation with this character just the same.

Every time I've met another person here, I've been struck by their personalities and the amount of work they do. American's have truly become separated from the planet on which they live. We work hard at our jobs as well, but the work is more abstract. Here the work is very tangible, and the results immediate.

The rest of the work day carried on much like the others-except today we saw a total of 7 manatees. We arrived back at the dock around 4:45 and got cleaned up for dinner. We had rice, stir fried vegetables, and fish for dinner. The fish was provided by Patch, one of the workmen from the other side of the island. He'd speared a couple of fish while out on his dorie yesterday and dropped them by as a gift. He'd even cleaned them so we didn't have to mess with the innards.

After dinner, more stories and tales were told all around with a visit from Harold and Jerry. For the better part of an hour, Harold, Jerry, Clifton and I traded stories about how we received our various scars-mine in typical American boy fashion, and theirs in typical Belizean boy fashion. Most of the stories are the same-you know, boys will be boys. The main difference, however, was that my stories never once mentioned a machete.

By 9:30, we were tired and went to bed.