Togian Islands Recap - an Epic Trip!

 Ten days on a boat - or in heaven, same thing! I love that you take your shoes off when you board and you don't get them back until you leave. The oh-so-warm water may be a bad sign of global warming, but I sure enjoyed the sensation. And, lots of interesting people to talk to when we're not underwater.

The diving, the boat, the crew, the passengers, the food. EVERYTHING was superb. This trip was put together by Epic Dive Adventures out of Kona, Hawaii. I wouldn't hesitate to take a trip with them again. However, I will be hesitating to go halfway around the world again. We have great diving right here in the Bahamas and Carribbean - not sure if I'll make this kind of Epic Dive trip again.

Here's a little video overview

Togian islands days 8-10

2-24 Friday

Good morning! Half the night was at anchor, the other half under way to the next site. I slept SOO good. Ready to go! First dive, at 7 am, is another beautiful wall. I have been diving with a small tank, (60?) but I didn't like running out of air so I switched to a larger (80?) tank today and I'm very glad I did. Current came up at the end and I had to struggle a bit, but I didn't have to worry. I had 1200 psi at that point. Plenty to last thru some struggle,and a safety stop. 

Love these schools of Banner fish

03

I did it! Four dives today. A second morning dive on another wall, an afternoon dive on a slope, and a night dive on a shallow reef. All warm comfortable, beautiful. Nothing particularly remarkable. Except maybe the large turtle on the night dive. 

Dali sponge - fabulous wall. Photo by Anna Barnes

For every dive there are crew that get your heart ready for you, help you on with your wetsuit, and help you on to the dinghy. I'm really getting spoiled. Then the dinghy takes you to the dive site. We're all sittingj on the gunnels of the boat with all our gear on. When we are at the dive site our guide, Wayan , says 1-2-3-go and we all fall over backwards into the water. 

2-25 Saturday 2dives

What did you do today?  We started with a dive on a wall that goes down over 1000 feet. We stayed above 80 feet! The water is warm and wonderful. The experience of flying over, under, beside, and all around the reef, is pure pleasure. Not a whole lot to see on this dive, but that was fixed on the second dive.

Second dive is a sea mount. I've always said my favorite type of dive is a wall. I might be revising that to say a Sea Mount. The prettiest stuff is often at the top and here the "top" started at 40 feet so we spent a lot of time there. Lots of Nemo's, cabbage coral and other fish. And a Cuttlefish! Jim got a good video of it. 

Back on board there was great conversation with Ana and Witt about Hawaii. Then we all took naps. Gathered again at happy hour time and were treated To a pod of dolphins at the bow - here's the quick video.

One of those days you feel so glad to be alive and experiencing the best life has to offer. 

2-26 Sunday 2dives, I sat out the 3D

First dive I called sea fan hill. It was covered with gorgeous sea fans. A bit of current made us work. 

I chose to stay on board and read my book, to kill a mockingbird, during the second dive.

Third dive was just gorgeous. Coral upon coral upon coral. There must be 100+ varieties.

We were supposed to visit a village in the afternoon, but weather didn't cooperate. 

The only thing I didn't like about the boat was the dinner schedule. You eat, then go to bed. Not good. 

Togian islands, days 5-7

Tuesday 2-21 

It's day 5 of the trip and I'm getting into the swing of things. I'm up and ready to go when I hear the singsong "Good Morning" at 6:30am. "Little breakfast is waiting for us: yogurt, fruit, bread. Then comes dive briefing and first dive. We are anchored by the volcano island called Una Una and the first dive is on a pinnacle. You can swim all the way around it at a depth of about 75 feet. We go slow and take about an hour. The site is called fish mania and you could see why. All the same corals we saw at the other sites but add an explosion of fish. Alvin put it well when he said " I never thought my visibility would be compromised because of so many fish."

After the first dive is "big breakfast" - eggs prepared to your specifications, fruit, bacon sausage and more. Then the second dive was right next to the first and with a similar profile. 

I skipped the afternoon dive with the thought that I will go on the night dive at 7.

I finished my book, City of Girls, and decided to read it over again from the beginning with an eye on the authors technique. I liked the book so much I want to pay attention to how she did it. Maybe I can emulate her to write a book about Mom.

I did go on the night dive. It was pretty boring, just over sand, but I was warm and comfortable. Good to know since it has been so long since I've done a night dive. 

Dinner at 8:30? I don't think so. I'm staying in my room and reading.

Wednesday 2-22

The morning dive was a deep dive. I skipped it. Jim and Alvin went, saw some barracuda. I did the second dive. We're still at Una Una. This was a pinacle and it was beautiful. Name of the dive site was Hong Kong.  So many coral, lots of anemones with their Nemo's. Jim got a good photo of me next to one. We learned about an app called Dive+. It knows just how to edit underwater photos for color correction. Wow. It does a great job of getting rid of the green and/or blue cast making the photo look so much better. 

We're leaving Una Una so I made sure to leave some of mom here to dive in this beauty.  

Next dive was a wall at Togean island and of what a wall it was. Taipei wall was the name. Sheer vertical wall down to forever with beautiful gardens on top. I was impressed with the tunicates. 

I'll bet the night dive tonight will be good. Just a feeling. But I'm skipping it. My knee hurts and I just feel the need to pace myself. I am an old lady now y know   I do believe I am the oldest driver on the boat. Not sure how to feel about that. Proud? Sad?

Thursday 2-23 , day 7

Jellyfish Lake. We've done a jellyfish lake before, on our Borneo trip in 1999. I was not expecting to be impressed, but I loved it! The water was 88 degrees, no wetsuit, no fins, just snorkeling. I felt so warm and free. Then looking at those jelly fish and feeling that I must be on mars because they look like little spaceships where the whole ship is involved propulsion. Then, noticing the plethora of them moving  this way and that made me think of the Jetsons and their flying cars. I started looking for George, Jane, and Leroy-I don't remember the daughters name. But they were still little spaceships, not flying cars, so I figured they were on vacation on mars! 

A screenshot from Epcot "Spaceship Earth" - just seems appropriate here!

I understand that jellyfish get nutrients directly from the sun thru photosynthesis. Such evolved creatures, we should learn from them. I thought this would be a quick dive-once you've seen some jellyfish there's nothing more to see, but I loved it. I was one of the last people to get out of the water and I could have stayed longer. 

Second dive was another beautiful wall on an atoll. We went straight down to 75 feet and could have gone to at least 200! I got low on air after 45 minutes. I wanted more time, so I think I'm going to change back to the full size tank. I've been using the smaller 63 cubic inch? Tank because I like the smaller size and I'm good on air. I'm used to coming up with 1000-1200 psi when everyone else is at 500. With this tank, I'm right with them and maybe even less.

Third dive was the wreck of a B24 bomber that crashed in 1942 during world war 2. Awful visibility but still a cool experience.

Book report

A live aboard dive trip is a great place for getting some reading done. When you're not underwater, there's not much to do. You can only chat with your fellow divers so much!

I love to read but not enough to make much time for it, so I take advantage of the boat time. Also there was no internet connection half the time so I was not distracted by Facebook, twitter, or current news items.

I read 5 books

• Caleb's crossing
• City of girls
• AI superpowers
• To kill a mocking bird (in preparation for seeing the play next month)
• Kite runner

That may be a record for me - 5 books on one month.  It makes me happy to know I can still read books. How did I fit all these books in my luggage? Yeah, right … you know better! I use Kindle, but not even a separate kindle device. I use my phone that I always have with me, my little iPhone SE with the kindle app. It fits in one hand. I can turn the page with my thumb on that same one hand. I can read it in bed. I can make the text as large as I want. I make the screen black with white text so it's not too bright at night. I have a book at the ready at any time! Just take it out of my pocket. And I can highlight passages and take notes. I buy my books rather that rent from a library or other free service. That way I can go back and find important passages from any book I've read. 

For example, from AI Superpowers

A discussion of AI in the classroom really piqued my interest, I highlighted it so I can find it later and remember. Here is an example:

During in-class teaching, schools will employ a dual-teacher model that combines a remote broadcast lecture from a top educator and more personal attention by the in-class teacher. For the first half of class, a top-rated teacher delivers a lecture via a large-screen television at the front of the class. That teacher lectures simultaneously to around twenty classrooms and asks questions that students must answer via handheld clickers, giving the lecturer real-time feedback on whether students comprehend the concepts. 

During the lecture, a video conference camera at the front of the room uses facial recognition and posture analysis to take attendance, check for student attentiveness, and assess the level of understanding based on gestures such as nodding, shaking one's head, and expressions of puzzlement. All of this data—answers to clicker questions, attentiveness, comprehension—goes directly into the student profile, filling in a real-time picture of what the students know and what they need extra help with. 

But in-class learning is just a fraction of the whole AI-education picture. When students head home, the student profile combines with question-generating algorithms to create homework assignments precisely tailored to the students' abilities. While the whiz kids must complete higher-level problems that challenge them, the students who have yet to fully grasp the material are given more fundamental questions and perhaps extra drills. At each step along the way, students' time and performance on different problems feed into their student profiles, adjusting the subsequent problems to reinforce understanding. 

In addition, for classes such as English (which is mandatory in Chinese public schools), AI-powered speech recognition can bring top-flight English instruction to the most remote regions. High-performance speech recognition algorithms can be trained to assess students' English pronunciation, helping them improve intonation and accent without the need for a native English speaker on site. 

From a teacher's perspective, these same tools can be used to alleviate the burden of routine grading tasks, freeing up teachers to spend more time on the students themselves. Chinese companies have already used perception AI's visual recognition abilities to build scanners that can grade multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank tests. Even in essays, standard errors such as spelling or grammar can be marked automatically, with predetermined deductions of points for certain mistakes. This AI-powered technology will save teachers' time in correcting the basics, letting them shift that time to communicating with students about higher-level writing concepts. 

Finally, for students who are falling behind, the AI-powered student profile will notify parents of their child's situation, giving a clear and detailed explanation of what concepts the student is struggling with. The parents can use this information to enlist a remote tutor through services such as VIPKid, which connects American teachers with Chinese students for online English classes. Remote tutoring has been around for some time, but perception AI now allows these platforms to continuously gather data on student engagement through expression and sentiment analysis. That data continually feeds into a student's profile, helping the platforms filter for the kinds of teachers that keep students engaged. 

Almost all of the tools described here already exist, and many are being implemented in different classrooms across China. Taken together, they constitute a new AI-powered paradigm for education, one that merges the online and offline worlds to create a learning experience tailored to the needs and abilities of each student. China appears poised to leapfrog the United States in education AI, in large part due to voracious demand from Chinese parents. Chinese parents of only children pour money into their education, a result of deeply entrenched Chinese values, intense competition for university spots, and a public education system of mixed quality. Those parents have already driven services like VIPKid to a valuation of over $3 billion in just a few years' time.

The AI Superpowers book was some thought-provoking stuff! Check out this Ted Talk by Kai-Fu Lee, the author of AI Superpowers.

But, my favorite book of these was hands-down City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love. It was in the style of a memoir. It was so well done that I determined to emulate the style if I ever get around to writing that book about my Mom. I figured the first thing to do is to re-read it and make even more notes the second time around. I got a start, but just couldn't do it - re-reading is not my cup of tea.

Day 4: Whale Sharks

We knew that whale sharks were a possibility on this trip, hey the cover photo for the trip is of a whale shark! But we were supposed to see them in the Maldives last year and didn't, so I wasn't counting on it. 

Well today was the day. We're at Garantolo What I didn't  realize is that they feed them here, just like the shark dives in the Bahamas, so it is pretty well guaranteed that we will see one of them.

This morning we saw not one, but two, majestic whale sharks. They obviously are accustomed to divers. There were 15 of us in the water and they paid us no never mind whatsoever. In fact, you had to work at it to stay out of their way. Their eyes are on the sides of their head, so when you're right in front of them, they can't see you. If you don't get out of the way they'll bump right into you. They are not scary at all. They are more like whales than sharks. They were being fed buckets of little shrimp. We could get close enough to see the whole process. They opened their huge mouths and let the ocean water pour in like a waterfall, or a whirlpool. Then you see their bodies flutter s the water is pushed out thru their gills while filtering the shrimp.

That's me!

Second dive was another gorgeous wall and reef. More of the rose coral. Lots of sweet pyramid butterfly fish, anemones with their Nemo's and other pretty tropicals in this 83 degree water. I figured mom would have loved these dives, so I scattered some ashes here and added a photo to her album.

Garantolo whale sharks and nice reef - Mom should like it here.

What we don't see is any bigger fish. No snapper, no grouper, no sharks, no barracuda. Overfishing has depleted the area.

I skipped the third dive and got a massage from Anita. She did a great job. The memorable part was being outside, on the top sun deck with a warm ocean breeze.

I'm in Heaven. I'm sure Anita wishes for a proper massage table - but she did sit down much of the time on the adjacent lounge.