Postcards from Paradise- Part 5

Thursday

This was the best day of the vacation for me, because we went SCUBA DIVING!!!!!
I got scuba certified during the summer of 2007, and I have done 6 dives since then. 4 of them were at the Crater at the Homestead in Midway, Utah. They were actually a part of my certification. The crater is just a deep hole that is filled with water. It's quite boring. The other 2 were in Grand Turk, in the Bahamas in October 2007. Those dives were amazing! I haven't gone since then, and I was a bit nervous. I reread my scuba manual and was peppering everyone with scuba questions during the whole vacation. I started to feel a bit better when I realized that everyone had answered one of my questions wrong, and that I had actually been right. I realized that I really still did remember the important stuff.

My dad, my sister Teri, David and I woke up early, around 5:30 a.m. and took a 2 hour taxi ride to Playa del Carmen. Then we caught the 8 a.m. ferry to Cozumel. It was a very long trip, but it was totally worth it! We dove with Liquid Blue Divers. I would highly recommend them if you are ever diving in Cozumel. The owner Mikaela (second from the left) was very nice and accomodating. Our divemaster, Luis (far right), was awesome!

We were on the boat Bonita Luna. The boat captain's name was Javier, and he was fun and very helpful. It was pretty windy that morning, and the boat was pretty rocky, but we made it to our first dive site very quickly.

Our first dive was on the Santa Rosa Wall. It was beautiful! There were some pretty cool swim throughs where there were tunnels in the coral. I actually didn't like that part very much. I was having a bit of trouble with neutral buoyancy (not drifting up or down) and I kept hitting my tank on the top of the caves. Plus I kept picturing the page in my dive manual that said basically, "Don't go into any caves until you have been trained how to do so unless you want to DIE!" Well, I went in, and I didn't die, but there wasn't really anything growing inside the caves, so it was kind of lame. It was probably because a bunch of other morons who couldn't figure out neutral buoyancy had gone through the cave before me had killed everything inside. Or maybe it was the hurricane, who knows?

The rest of the dive was amazing though. We were on a wall, so you could look up or down and there was stuff growing everywhere.

There were tube shaped corals, fan corals, anenemes, bright purple corals, really cool white corals that looked like funnels that were growing all over each other, and tons of animals. We saw a giant crab that's legs were probably 2 inches thick, and a large white manta ray.

We saw tons of beautiful fish, my favorite were the Queen Angels.

We also saw a giant grouper, and a small baraccuda. David got really sea sick while he was on the first dive. I think it was all of the head over heels action while swimming through the caves. Next time I will make sure he takes dramamine before we dive. We were down 42 minutes and I went a max depth of 79 feet. I actually got a little sea sick after the first dive while I sat on the rocky boat waiting for one guy to finish his dive. But once the boat started traveling instead of just bobbing, I felt better.

After the first dive, we went to relax and eat lunch at a really cool beach restaurant. We invited the dive master to sit with us, and had fun getting to know him. He's lived in Cozumel his whole life. His parents were dive masters. He started diving when he was 8 years old, and his whole family went diving together all the time. He was always the caboose end of their family dive train. He has been a dive master for 16 years, and he dives 6 days a week, 7 during the busy season. I asked him if he ever got tired of diving. He said sometimes he got tired physically from the exertion, but he loved diving every day. The only other place he has ever gone diving was in Belize, and he said it wasn't as nice as Cozumel.

Our second dive was at Punta Tunish (or Rocky Point). This was my favorite dive. It was so beautiful! It was a drift dive, so we didn't have to do much, mostly just sit and let the current take us while we watched the beautiful scenery go by. We were supposed to only go 60 feet deep, but when we first went in, the bottom was about 70 feet down. It took us a minute to figure out we were too deep, then another minute to figure out where our dive master was. He was about 20 feet away on the top of a small hill. Once we had that figured out, we were off.

We saw 2 sea turtles. One of them was eating sea weed off the bottom.

The other one was floating on the surface when the dive master first saw it. He pointed it out to me, but I couldn't see anything. He took us closer, and I finally spotted it as it started diving down to the bottom. It was really cool! We were able to get a few feet away. I liked the jaggedy back of it's shell.

We saw a big ray, and a huge eel. The eel was about 12 inches across and we could see about 6 feet of it. It was hiding under a ledge, and I think the divemaster knew it lived there. He had us go under the ledge to see it. Of course, that was when my ears decided that they were done equalizing. I was really frustrated because I couldn't get down deep enough. The DM was great though. When he realized what my trouble was, he patiently worked with me for about 10 minutes to get my ears working again. Then he took me down under the ledge to see the eel. I'm so glad he did that for me, because my ears worked fine after that. My ears always seem to have more trouble on the second dive. I think I just need to be extra careful on the second dive to equalize my ears every foot!

There were huge schools of bright yellow fish, and small silver fish.We saw 2 huge groupers, more Queen Angelfish, and some really cool gray fish whose scales looked to me like they were made out of stone because of the mottled coloring.

I saw a what looked like a steel marble about 1 inch across rolling around inside a bowl shaped rock. I tried to get down to figure out what it was, but I wasn't able too. There wer all kinds of tiny fish and creatures among the seaweed on the bottom. It was just amazing! Beautiful! I want to go again next week! Alas, I live in the middle of a desert, and have the Crater as my scuba diving option. We went down to a max depth of 65 ft, and were down for 55 minutes.

After we were done diving, we had to hustle to make the 3 p.m. ferry. Again Mikaela was very helpful. She sent someone running to find a taxi for us while we were getting our gear off the boat so we could make it in time. I'm glad we made it, because the next ferry wasn't until 5, and I didn't want to wait that long. When we got to the hotel we were really tired, so we just hung out in the hotel for the rest of the day.