Aude picked us up at 8:30am to take us to the ferry terminal, we were going to Cozumel which was a one hour ferry ride from Playa. There were a few surprises in store today, the first being how busy the ferry was and secondly how busy San Miguel de Cozumel was. For some unknown reason, David had thought that it was a sleepy wee island with not much going on - it couldn't have been further from the truth. For starters, Cozumel has the Yucatan's only deep water port for the cruise ships, an airport (which even has direct flights from Europe) and a hotel zone to rival Cancun and Playa. It is also Mexico's largest island, so in summary, completely opposite to what David thought.

We weren't hanging around in this bustling wee town anyway, we were straight into a taxi heading for the marina just a short drive from town. 'Anita', our boat, was waiting for us and no sooner had we jumped on board, we were heading back out to sea and south towards the world famous dives sites.

We were going to drift dive on a reef wall called Santa Rosa while Maria followed on the surface with her snorkel. With a drift dive, as the name suggests, you are sitting in a current and just 'drift' along - very convenient for lazy divers like David. The current was a bit stronger than anticipated at first and the divers were zooming past the reef quicker than expected - it was no different on the surface, Maria was swimming against the current too, to slow the progress and have a chance to study the reef.

The reef was amazing - it was full of colour, corals and creatures. Whilst the top of the reef sat only about 15m from the surface it dropped off like a vertical cliff into the abyss of the deep blue sea. There was so much to see that there was little need to scan ahead - this led to another surprise of the day. A large nurse shark, maybe 2-2.5m, suddenly appeared in front of us and it wasn't camera shy either. It came up to within 2m for a photo shoot before calmly cruising off. Maria, being alone on surface, had her nerve tested as this was her first close encounter with a nurse shark. She held her nerve, staying in the water instead of retreating to boat. She was rewarded shortly after when a turtle that slowly swam past the divers decided to take a breath of air within touching distance away from her.

Everyone was excitedly talking about the dive over a tasty lunch and eager to get back in the water for the second dive, this time at a dive site called Paradise. The second dive was equally as good as first although without sharks and turtles. There was an abundance of other sealife which kept the divers down a little longer than expected - we were now running a bit late to catch the ferry back to Playa.

We missed the ferry...no big deal though, we just made our way to Fat Tuesday, a bar on the pedestrian strip just a stones throw from the ferry terminal. We sipped on cold beers and Margaritas for a couple of hours until the next ferry.