I’ve been reluctantly drying out from my last dive now for about three and a half months. And that’s just enough time for a dive junkie and her dive junkie boyfriend and their dive junkie friend to put together another dive trip! This time we’re off to…drum roll please… Thailand! The land of smiles, Buddhist temples, and spectacular diving. This trip came together quickly and quite easily thanks to our friend Alexandra Bassarab at Blue View Divers on the island of Koh Phi Phi Don, south of Phuket on the West side of the country. She was an all star in putting together a package with her local shop and booking us a boat (the whole boat!) for the live aboard portion of the trip. We never did give up on doing a live aboard and, just fyi, the Similan Islands where we’re headed are ranked by the National Geographic Society as being one of the top ten dive destinations in the entire world. WOW!
Warren and Alex will be tag-teaming the leadership of this trip and I think they make a really fantastic duo! Having someone in Thailand now who knows the place and the diving is such a huge advantage – there won’t be any disappointments or unexpected curve balls for us to contend with in regards to the dive shop, accommodations, or live aboard company because Alex has been living and working in Thailand for some time now and is busy personally checking out all those places for us. With a diver like her managing the Blue View shop, I have total confidence we’ll be taking our group to the right place!
So without further ado…here are the details!!
We’ll be running the trip through our local dive shop Ocean Sports here in Edmonton but don’t want to limit spots only to locals. So, if you happen to live elsewhere but are interested in coming…you can! All you need to do is call up Ocean Sports and pay your deposit. Right from the get go meeting new people and making new friends has always been a big part of what makes diving so awesome for me. You really do get to hang out with a diverse bunch of people, from all over the world, and a shared love of diving is all it takes to form those friendships. So, come on our trip and make some new dive friends!
Warren and Alex will also be offering PADI courses – they recommend Advanced Open Water so we can take full advantage of all the dive sites around the Phi Phi islands as well as Enriched Air as nitrox fills are awfully cheap in Thailand. Since she’s familiar with the local wildlife Alex would be a great person to take your Fish ID course with to learn all about the species found in the Andaman Sea and Indian Ocean. And if you’re interested in side mount diving, Warren is your guy!
I’m most excited about simply going so far away from home, going someplace so completely removed from the North American culture and scenery that I’m used to. The Caribbean and Hawaii are the only times I’ve stepped off of my own continent so flying to the other side of the world (and crossing the international date line while I’m at it, which is on my bucket list by the way) is completely thrilling to me. Its about time I get out and really see what else is out there! I’ve been a fairly sheltered traveler so far – I have no doubt that Thailand is going to be an enormous cultural and culinary shock to my senses. Perfect! Also awesome? Thailand is basically as far from my home in Edmonton as it is possible to go. Any further around and we’d be on our way home. Warren is convinced I’ll have less trouble adjusting to the time change too, because I’m so used to flipping between working days and nights as it is. I have my doubts about that – Thailand is 13 hours ahead…its already tomorrow over there. The jet lag will probably show us both who is boss!
In the meantime, here are some pictures of the places we’ll be visiting and the amazing things we’re hoping to see! If you’ve been to Thailand, diving or otherwise, I’d love to hear about your favorite places and any recommendations for “can’t miss” activities, restaurants, or places to see! Post away in the comments section!
390 days, 71 dives, 3 trips, 6 different places, and 58 hours and 54 minutes of bottom time later…I’m a PADI Master Scuba Diver! The MSD is the highest non-professional rating in the PADI system of diving education. To get here I had to complete my open water course (which I did in Cozumel in January 2011), my advanced open water course (again in Cozumel the same month), my rescue diver course (locally here in Alberta in July of 2011), 5 specialty courses (I’ve done 11) and have logged at least 50 dives. My 50th dive was at a site called Delilah in Cozumel this past January. My first open water dive was on January 17th of 2011….and my 50th was on January 16th of 2012! 1 year less a day later and I’d qualified for MSD. I wasn’t rushing, I just really REALLY love to dive!
This is a big milestone for me and I’m super proud of my accomplishments so far. I’m also very thankful to all the wonderful instructors and dive buddies who got me here! I’m still thinking of myself as a guppie diver (ie- brand new), but Warren tells me I can’t call myself that anymore…guppies aren’t MSDs he says! So I guess now I’m a somewhat experienced(ish) diver who still has lots to learn but can probably handle more than she thinks she can. Yeah…that’s what I’ll go with for now.
Adding to my collection of PADI cards
I’m so looking forward to all the new places this sport will continue to take me, all the lessons I’ll learn in the future, and all the awesome new friends I’ll meet!
In closing I’d just like to say (and this is for Kari)…. WHOOOHOOO!!!
Plastic. Everywhere. Big pieces. Little pieces. Crumbling pieces. Every color. Every shape. Impossible to get all of it. PLASTIC is the word that stays with me when I think back to our Cozumel Beach Clean-Up event. After much planning (read about that process here and here) and the exciting addition of new partners and sponsors, 12 of us set out on January 21st of 2012 to find a beautiful beach in need of some love and to clean up all the junk.
a beautiful beach...check.
Before I tell you why this event was both heart warming and heart breaking all at the same time, and the numerous light bulb moments I was wholly unprepared for, I’d like to throw a little praise at our sponsors, partners, and participants.
Atkins Scuba – Kari & Matthew couldn’t have been more supportive of this clean up idea and without their encouragement, support, and excellent organizational skills the event never would have happened. They arranged for the resort’s participation, got Chac-Choc Tours on board, coordinated efforts with a local clean-up group, supplied refreshments and garbage bags and were the voice of the event in Cozumel while I was off gallivanting in the Cayman Islands. Thank you for being so completely awesome!
Blue Angel Resort& Scuba School – Resort owner Eva stepped up in a big way and not only joined in our clean-up efforts but also brought with her some delicious quesadillas with fresh guacamole and pico de gallo. After spending a few hours collecting garbage under the hot sun those snacks were much appreciated. Eva also helped out with transportation to and from the beach. You rock!
Thank you Blue Angel!
Oceansports – My local dive shop here in Edmonton blew me away by offering to sponsor the event. Their donation bought us mesh bags that we used for underwater clean up throughout our week of diving and those bags will now live at the Blue Angel to be used all year long. Best. Dive shop. Ever.
Chac-Choc Tours – This local tour company volunteered to provide transportation to and from the beach. That alone would have been awesome, but then Juan also brought with him refreshments and was a total cleaning MACHINE on the beach, so inspiring to watch him in action! I like to think of him as our secret weapon.
lean mean cleaning machine
The Participants – In addition to Warren and I, Kari, Eva, and Juan, we were joined by Stephanie, Debbie, and Shannon from the Edmonton crew, another guest of the Blue Angel Resort, 2 locals, and a volunteer from the Humane Society visiting from Norway. Everyone worked hard, had fun, and really understood why the clean-up was so important. What an awesome bunch of people!
After introductions in the hotel lobby we all piled into the waiting trucks and headed for the east end of the island. We stopped on a gorgeous stretch of beach and trekked down from the road all gung-ho and ready to leave the place sparkling…at least, that was my expectation. I expected to find garbage originating mostly from Cozumel itself, with the occasional flotsam drifted from elsewhere. I expected to find intact garbage, easily removable. I expected mostly beer cans and food containers, remnants of parties and picnics. I was in for quite the surprise.
What we found instead was evidence of just how huge the marine debris problem is. Irrefutable proof that our consumer culture is clogging up our oceans. Almost all of the trash on the beach was clearly washed up from elsewhere. I was shocked not only at the amount of it, but at the variety. Toothbrushes. Motor oil cans. Shoes. Children’s toys. Pens. More straws and plastic cutlery than I imagined possible. Computer monitors, Styrofoam containers, beverage bottles, syringes, pails. Even a vial of blood, the kind I collect at work all the time. All in about 1 kilometer of beach.
just getting started
We spread out with bags, each tackling different sections. In no time at all the full bags were piling up. Cleaning that beach became a solitary activity, each of us bent to our task and lost in our thoughts. Wondering how it could really be THIS bad. I was totally caught up in figuring out how I could use less plastic, less STUFF, in my own life. And then I was caught up with the awful realization that much of my own garbage has probably ended up on another beach, in another country, or floating at sea waiting for the currents to push it ashore somewhere. That could be my last toothbrush there, or my discarded flip flop. That might be the bottle cap from the last Coke I drank. How can I be sure that everything I toss into a garbage bag or bin in my every day life actually stays there? Bags rip, bins get knocked over. Trash gets swept away by the wind, its next stop the sea. I was horrified.
I also learned that plastic breaks up, but it doesn’t break down. For every piece of plastic I picked up there was another one that crumbled when I touched it, littering the beach with dozens of smaller pieces impossible to collect. It was distressing. Here I was trying to rid the beach of this junk and instead I was making it harder to remove! Then I wondered how many of what I thought were grains of sand were actually plastic particles, so small we can’t even tell the difference. Every piece of plastic ever made still exists today. It’ll get smaller and smaller and smaller but it’ll never go away. We’re eating our own plastic now… these tiny particles are ending up in the food chain, accidentally swallowed by sea animals and birds because they’re too miniscule to avoid.
That was the heart breaking part. The heart warming part was the people – 12 amazing people who took a whole afternoon out of their vacations or daily lives to help be part of the solution. Everyone worked tirelessly, without complaint, and when we were done (because we ran out of garbage bags, not because the beach was spotless) we all shared in a wonderful sense of accomplishment. I was proud to call these people my friends, proud that we’d done this great thing together. Seeing what just 12 people could do in 2 hours time restored my flagging faith in humanity – we collected 34 large garbage bags of trash and many miscellaneous other pieces too big to be bagged. Imagine what we could do if we started addressing the source of the problem instead of just its symptoms!
Overall the clean up event was a huge success – so much so that the Blue Angel Scuba School is hosting another one in February! There are so many amazing groups out there organizing clean-up events in YOUR local community, all you have to do is look. If you’d like to organize one of your own, I highly recommend asking local businesses and organizations to be involved. You might be surprised at who jumps at the chance, I know I was! Also…bring WAY MORE garbage bags than you think you’ll actually need!
Just ONE of the trucks we filled up with trash (and me) - photo credit to Warren McKay
Our small but mighty gang! (photo credit to Warren McKay)
Lastly, here’s a great little video on plastic. What struck me was the fact that every single piece of plastic ever made still exists today. Why are we wasting this incredible product that’s designed to last forever on manufacturing items that are thrown away within minutes?!? Until we get that brain teaser sorted out lets all USE LESS PLASTIC!
I’ve learned so much since I started diving. Through my courses, by watching great divers in action, and often by making my own mistakes (check out my ‘uh-oh’ decompression moment here). But one thing nobody ever had to teach me was “don’t destroy or hurt what you’ve come to see”. Apparently, this isn’t as common sense as I think it is. Warren and I had the misfortune of spending January 23rd and 24th on boats with some other divers who don’t seem to care much for the old (yet oh so important) ‘do no harm’ adage. In the interest of being open-minded, I considered the possibility that perhaps the ignorant behavior I saw underwater was simply a lack of education. Maybe, I thought, these people actually DON’T know better. Maybe they are legitimately unaware that what they are doing is destructive and all it’ll take to stop it is for someone to point it out to them and explain why. After some thoughtful conversation with some of our dive friends at dinner Warren and I tried to put it behind us. We were back on the boat the next morning for 2 more dives with a new group of people. Unfortunately for us (but much worse for Cozumel’s underwater inhabitants), 3 of the divers with us blew that entire ‘maybe its a lack of education’ theory right out of the water. This post is written with sadness, anger, and a pretty big sense of helplessness. I think its important to share these experiences here though – for myself, as a way to reflect and decompress, but also in the hope that putting this out there will cause all of you to reflect too. Think about how these lessons apply to whatever environment you find yourself in (underwater or otherwise) and, perhaps more importantly, what you can do when you see the kinds of behavior we just did.
So, without any further ado, here’s the skinny on what happened.
Our dive group on Monday included 2 older ladies who’ve been diving in Cozumel many times. We all dropped into the water together and immediately upon reaching the sandy bottom one of them pulled out a home made metal pole (a 10 inch bolt with a few nuts screwed on) and began jabbing it into the sand with every fin kick. She pulled herself along the bottom in this manner, every kick accompanied by another stab with the pole. I was immediately alarmed. “What on earth is she doing that for??” I wondered, followed quickly by the realization that she was looking up and around, not down to make sure that there wasn’t any number of creature (stingray, flounder, fish…you get the idea) about to be impaled by her ‘aide’. I can’t think of a single reason that a competent diver with good buoyancy control would need to drag themselves around underwater like this. And if you aren’t yet a competent diver with good buoyancy control (perhaps you are new and still working on these skills, as I am) then you should simply put more air in your BCD and stay a little higher up so you aren’t smacking into the bottom. Its not good for your gear to be dragged through the sand and smash against rocks and coral, its not good for your air consumption because you’ll be working so much harder to stay streamlined and horizontal, and its REALLY not good for the bottom!! Things went from bad to worse when we reached the reef, because she continued to claw her way through it with that damn pole, leaving a wake of damaged coral behind her and numerous creatures running for cover. Both her and her dive buddy were also kicking the bottom constantly; that poor dive site took a real beating.
Once back on the boat and about to start our second dive the guide suggested she be careful not to put the pole into coral. She quickly replied that she would NEVER do that, she ONLY ever puts it the dirt. Warren and I stayed far enough away from them on the second dive that we wouldn’t have to watch the destruction, both unable to stomach it. We were both angry, but unsure what our place was. Do we say something? Do we leave that to the guide? She’d already been called on it but flatly denied any wrong doing and the guide was unwilling to pursue it further. We kept quiet and spoke later to our friends at the hotel/dive shop. These divers were approached by a staff member that evening about our concerns but it was clear that they still didn’t believe they’d done anything wrong and how dare we suggest otherwise. One of them smartly informed us that her son is a marine biologist and so she knows all about diving appropriately to protect the marine environment. Really? Really?!? Warren suggested she take the Peak Performance Buoyancy course and that she was seriously over-weighted (we were lead on belts around our waist or in pockets on our BCDs to be able to sink, all that neoprene and compressed air is buoyant! Fine tuning the amount of weight you need can be challenging but is very important). His suggestions were not particularly well received.
Tuesday was a whole new group of divers (we specifically requested NOT to be on the same boat as those 2 ladies) and we headed to the southern most part of the island for a less-frequently-dived site famous for its soft corals. It was beautiful and an uneventful dive. With us was a group of 3, 2 of whom are PADI Staff Instructors, which is fairly high up on the PADI totem pole. The 3rd is a PADI Dive Master. I know this because they’ve been boasting about it since we met them on Friday…the words pompous and arrogant came to mind as a first impression. But, you can’t expect to like everyone you dive with and just because you don’t like them doesn’t mean they aren’t also good at what they do. I wasn’t impressed with how they flaunted the rules of no decompression diving (by going into a fair bit of decompression, and then bragging about it like its a good thing) on that first dive – but that’s their business I suppose.
A Hawksbill turtle - Not "the" turtle, but a beautiful turtle just the same
On the second dive, an enormous Hawksbill turtle was sighted right under where we descended. Generally turtles continue to grow larger as they age, so this guy had to have been really, really old! Immediately upon sighting the turtle the a for-mentioned DM (idiot #1 let’s call him) charged straight at him, grabbed hold of the top of his shell and came down right on top of him, forcing the turtle into the sand below. He held him there, quite forcefully as its a big turtle and he was working pretty hard to escape, shoved the camera into his face and snapped away. Meanwhile, idiot #2 (one of the staff instructors) charged up and got right into that turtle’s face from the other side also snapping away with his camera. This poor turtle, who I can only imagine to be quite frightened as he was still working frantically to escape, was caught between the two of them and couldn’t move fast enough to get away. Meanwhile the guide was shaking his noise maker and signalling them to stop, I was banging hard on my tank and waving my hands at them, and Warren was kicking hard against the current trying to push them away. Bless his heart, he went right over there and body checked those two idiots, managing to push one of them away from the turtle. Despite all this frantic noise making and gesturing underwater these two remained hell bent on assaulting that turtle to get their precious pictures. Once the turtle finally got away, our guide continued on the tour. I wished desperately for the rest of that dive NOT to see a turtle, or a shark, or an eagle ray, or anything else that might possibly be unlucky enough to draw the idiots’ attention…or slow enough that they could catch it. They had the gall to continue on that dive as if nothing bad had happened, as if they’d done nothing wrong. Warren and I swam along, both fuming, waiting for the dive to end so we could get to the surface and spit out the various curses we were quickly accumulating. At the end of the dive, when all of us were hovering at our safety stops, a nurse shark was spotted below. All 3 idiots charged it, then seemed a bit frightened when it made a move to escape, but idiot #2 decided that aggressively chasing a startled shark was a good idea and off he went after it. Lucky for the shark, he was no match. Lucky for him, that shark didn’t turn around and bite him…though Warren and I were both hoping very much that he would. Once again, the idiots were all in deco, leaving those of us on the boat time to stew over what we’d just witnessed.
Idiot #1 (the DM who held the turtle down) surfaced first and before he could even board the boat Warren jumped into the water and gave him a piece of our minds. I heard words I won’t repeat here but everyone of them was justified, and I was glad he said it. His response to being asked (not quite this politely) what he was thinking was “I wanted to go for a ride”. Seriously, that’s what he said. When the other two were back on the boat the guide told them its important not to touch anything, and not to corner the animals. I thought he was being far too kind about it, but he was trying to address it in a manner that wouldn’t cost him his tips – a big part of his income. Idiot #2 kept exclaiming “but I didn’t touch it!”, as if that made his actions excusable. Never mind that all of us had witnessed him grabbing at the turtle. The last idiot chimed in with “well I didn’t touch the turtle” to which another diver on board retorted “yeah but you were kicking the reef!”. Her response? “Oh well”. That’s when the rest of us all just sat in stunned silence, trying hard to squelch the urge to throw them all over board and their damn cameras too. They were huddled together admiring all the wonderful close ups of that turtle they’d gotten….some things I just can’t stomach. If only I’d had MY camera – I could have documented their awfulness and plastered it all over the internet in a good ole’ fashioned public shaming. With egos that big only embarrassment is likely to make them think twice.
To the 3 idiots
As PADI professionals they most certainly knew that their behavior was absolutely unacceptable, completely appalling, and that the rest of us were justified in our anger. They just didn’t care though. In fact, Warren was approached later on by the oldest of the group and informed that it was ‘unprofessional’ of him to call out the behavior on a boat full of people. If he’d had a problem he should have said so later on in private. That his own behavior was way past ‘unprofessional’ didn’t register. If you’re going to brag about being a PADI staff instructor, then I think its fair game for others to hold you to those professional standards. That these 3 got through PADI successfully makes me think a little less of the brand. That’s harsh, but its true. Then again, the way that Warren called them out on their behavior, as another professional representative of PADI, made me feel a bit better.
Another problem in all of this was the way the guides responded…meekly. At the end of both days I watched the offenders tip them. I understand that this is their income, that they depend on those tips. But there must be another way! A friend of ours had a great suggestion – Warren and I shouldn’t tip them. We should instead inform them that they haven’t earned our tips today, because they allowed that awful behavior to take place to get the offenders’ tips and so in return they wouldn’t be getting ours. This strategy would certainly pack a real punch over the long term, but only if for every bad diver out there who doesn’t get their hand slapped there is also a good diver ready to let the guide know that they are unimpressed. Lets all encourage dive operations to respect the ocean and everything in it by taking our business to only those that will not tolerate such awful behaviors. Don’t get me wrong here – I love the Blue Angel. But after what I saw these past few days its clear there is still room for improvement. Knowing a few of the people working behind the scenes here I’m confident positive change is already taking hold, but I won’t be afraid to with hold tips in the future or post honest reviews on tripadvisor.com and scubaboard.com. Money is a powerful motivator and while I can’t control individual behavior, I do believe I can have an impact on whether or not that behavior is tolerated. I can almost guarantee that the next time that particular turtle spots divers he’s going to take off and want nothing to do with them. There are probably a lot of other sea creatures out there who’ve had similar encounters and also work to avoid people now. Long term, why on earth would I want to go diving someplace where all the wildlife hides as soon as I hit the water? My tourist dollars will be going to places with zero-tolerance policies for dealing with those divers who touch, poke, chase, molest and assault the animals, or damage the reef.
If you’ve had similar experiences, or you’ve got suggestions on how best to respond to these sorts of problems, I’m all ears! Comments are always welcome. In the meantime, I’m even more motivated than ever to be the best diver I can be. I’d like to be the kind of diver others see as an example on how to properly behave underwater and interact with marine inhabitants. I’d like to be the kind of diver I’ve been lucky enough to have as my own role models. Thank you to them – for reinforcing right and wrong as it applies to scuba and for sharing their knowledge and suggestions in dealing with the gong shows above.
PS – If you’d like to see the kind of amazing pictures that result from a healthy and appropriate turtle encounter, check out Warren’s pictures here or read about it here. We got up close and personal with more turtles than we could keep track of on our trip and it was all because we let them approach us on their own terms, making sure never to chase them, touch them, or come between them and a quick exit once they’d had enough of us.
As predicted, the pace of life here in Cozumel at the Blue Angel Resort is much less laid back than in Cayman Brac! We’re up before 7 every morning and rush off to breakfast then onto the boat by 8. We do 2 dives before heading back to the hotel around noon and then I’m usually rushing up to the room to warm up and rinse off in the shower before lunch time. We have yet to get onto an afternoon boat trip but have kept busy with shore dives and night dives. In the past 5 days of diving I’ve completed my night diver specialty, navigation specialty, fish ID specialty, and the new shark conservation specialty. In the evenings there’s always a group of us thoroughly enjoying the hotel’s 2-for-1 happy hour before heading into town for dinner. Once again, we’re in bed by 10pm. Its been busy!! While there’s less time for relaxing (and none for blogging!), its a ton of fun to be part of a group trip. Diving, drinking, and eating together for a week straight makes for fast friendships and many fun memories.Its the people I’ve met here that really make the Blue Angel a special place for me.
Waiting for the sun to set so we can go diving...
Tuesday and Thursday we went night diving. Its exactly what it sounds like – we went scuba diving after the sun had set. Scary? A little. Thrilling? Absolutely! Tuesday it was just Warren and I so we went from shore to visit the local fish nursery. The dive right in front of the hotel is chock FULL of baby fish! Its an unbelievably adorable place. We started into the water just as the sun was fading into the horizon, turned on our lights and headed under. Visiting a place you know well at night can be a totally different experience. Different creatures venture out, while others are no where to be seen. Its a little eerie to be out there in the dark. The moon was out so it wasn’t pitch black, but its still unsettling to not know what could be swimming by that you can’t see. I also found that if I spun around a coral head or a creature too much I would get disoriented and lose track of what direction I was going. I’d have to stop, take a few breaths, and wait for the current to push me so I would know where I was in relation to the site. On this dive my training task was to use a compass to relocate our entry point at the end of the dive. I was quite pleased with myself when I found the channel we needed to follow out! We kept that dive short because our trip companions were all waiting on us to go for dinner – it was a 51 minute dive with a maximum of 24ft and an average of 18ft. At that shallow of a depth no decompression time is measured in hours rather than minutes and we’re both good enough on air we could probably have stayed down about 2 hours if we’d wanted to. We saw some porcupine fish, balloon fish, lobster, crabs, a beautiful southern stingray and a few spotted eels. We even saw a chain moray which is extremely rare for this part of the Caribbean! Sadly, there were no octopus sightings on this dive. Octopus are one of my favorite things to see underwater, right up there with sharks even!
Chain Moray Eel - very rare in Cozumel!
Arrow Crab! He's got bright purple pinchers
On Thursday we signed up for a night dive from the boat and a few others from our Edmonton group joined in. We boarded at 5:30 pm then sat over the dive site to watch the sun set. It was beautiful, and a wonderful way to spend the last minutes of daylight. 3 people on the boat had never done a night dive before, and 1 had never done a night dive from the boat (only from shore, which is less intimidating I think). We all rolled backwards off the boat into the dark waves and started our descent right away. We were on Paradise reef with a maximum depth of 40ft (and an average of 33ft) and it was a long leisurely dive time of an hour and 4 minutes. This dive was EXACTLY what a great night dive should be – TONS of cool creatures and fish, no overcrowding, competent divers, and my light didn’t fail! (though I was carrying 2 back-ups just in case….you’d be surprised how often they do go out mid-dive). In addition to some sleeping parrot fish, crabs, file fish, flamingo tongues, sea cucumbers and stingrays we also got to see a handful of things I’d never seen before – a scorpion fish and 2 sea horses. There were fire worms, a peacock flounder doing his best to remain camouflaged, and 5 octopus! Have I mentioned how much I love octopus?? They’re shimmery and change colors faster than you can even name them, and watching them move still blows my mind, every time.
Fire worm - do NOT touch him, he will HURT you!
flamingo tongues - they're a type of nudibranch
Yellow Stingray
Sleeping Parrot FIsh - he's just laying flat on the coral trying to be inconspicuous
my first seahorse sighting! I think 'elegant' is a good descriptor for them
i heart octopus!
Mr. "you can't see me" Peacock Flounder (I love how his eyes move sideways)
a spotted moray eel, looking fierce
Now just in case you’re thinking that night diving sounds like the most fantastic activity ever and you can’t wait to try it…let me tell you about the flatworms. They’re these tiny little awful red worms that come out at night and are attracted to light. They swarm around my light and my head and tried to crawl into my ears. I hate them. So thoroughly creepy. Luckily, they’re harmless – they don’t bite, or sting, or do anything than freak me out. Kari had mentioned last year that some of the coral will eat them (she prefaced this by saying she’s not usually in favor of forcing interaction underwater, or injuring/killing sea life of any kind…but she hates them just as much as the rest of us!) so I spent a good portion of my dive following her around waiting for her to do just that so I could see what kind of coral it was that liked the worms. I was SO THRILLED to finally see it happen and then I set off happily feeding as many worms to as much coral as I could, grinning gleefully as I did. Is this evil of me? You know, I don’t even care if it is.
My last task for the night diver specialty on this dive was to sit on the sand and hold the light against my chest so the light disappeared (we don’t turn them on and off underwater as that is when they are most likely to fail) and just sit there, for 3 minutes, in the darkness. Honestly, this isn’t as bad as it sounds. There was enough light from the moon above and all the other divers with their lights that it didn’t feel too overwhelming. It certainly wasn’t my favorite 3 minutes of the dive, but it wasn’t nightmare inducing either.
2 more great dives into the log book! As of right now I have 63 dives logged (I left Edmonton with 20…), and I’ve gone from 839 minutes (or 14 hours) of bottom time to 3049 (or 50 hours). Yay me! Despite those being impressive numbers to me, I’m more excited about how drastically I’ve seen my skill level grow on this trip. I am not the same diver was. My air consumption, buoyancy, and confidence have all improved significantly. I owe a lot of this to Warren – he’s been an amazingly supportive dive buddy and sets an excellent example to follow underwater.
This afternoon is the highly anticipated Cozumel beach clean-up. A local tour company has volunteer transportation for our crew, and one of the resort owners Eva is bringing along snacks and drinks. I trucked costco-sized boxes of disposable gloves from Edmonton and Kari’s got the garbage bags. We’re set, we’re excited, and we’re only slightly hungover (there may or may not be pictures of a tequila fueled pool party floating around from last night)…so its time to get trashy!
I’m going to go out on a limb here and make a bold statement. I know what it would feel like to scuba dive on the moon. It would be dark with a stark, bare and harsh monochromatic landscape. There would be huge boulders and menacing looking rock formations. It would be quiet, totally devoid of all noise. Lonely. It would also be shockingly beautiful. Alien and mesmerizing. It would certainly be unlike anything you’d ever seen before, or even imagined existed. It would be just like cenote diving in the Mayan Riviera.
Friday and Saturday were spent cavern diving in the cenotes around the Playa Del Carmen & Tulum area (read this post to find out what a cenote is). We met up with Nico from Cenote Xperience bright and early Friday morning and headed out to our first destination, Chac Mool. Nico is a certified cave diving instructor, as all cavern dive guides must be. The difference between a cave and a cavern in diving terms is that caves are well beyond the zone of light, while the cavern is the designated portion of a cave where daylight from an exit point still reaches. If something went wrong in a cavern and you needed to get out, you could simply look for light and then head towards it. In cave diving, entirely different procedures apply because you won’t be able to see an exit. Nico was incredibly knowledgeable and safety-oriented and his first briefing was the most thorough I have ever heard. In short, he is most definitely the guy you want to get in touch with if you’d like to go do some cenote diving. Highly, highly recommend. Check out his website in the link above, or look for him on facebook. After the briefing we set up our gear in the jungle on a large cement table and then made the trek down the stone stairs to the cenote below. Its impossible not to notice immediately how clear the water is. You peer into it and its as if there isn’t any water there at all, you can see every rock and every crevasse at the bottom. In the part of my logbook that records visibility I wrote “perfect”.
photo courtesy of Warren McKay
The main feature of our first cenote, Chac Mool, is the way the daylight streams into the water casting rays of light all the way through the cavern. Its downright magical! Another interesting feature was the halocline – where the fresh water in the top 20 to 30 ft mixes with the salt water below. It creates a shimmery, iridescent blur than destroys the visibility as soon as you’re in it. Swimming in a halocline feels like trying to drive at 130 km/hr through pouring rain with no wiper blades. At night. Nico was less than 2 feet in front of me but all I could see was a hazy gray shape. Poor Warren was bringing up the rear and with 2 sets of fins stirring up the halocline in front of him he had a hell of a time trying to swim. He had both his arms out in front of him because he couldn’t even tell if he was about to run into something. Luckily the visibility is instantly restored to perfect as soon as you’re through it. Looking down on it from above in the fresh water, or looking up at it from below in the salt water, is really trippy too. Its like a sheet of translucent ice or a glassy surface, just floating in the water. I’m struggling even to describe it, its just so unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Passing from fresh to salt water on a dive also creates some challenges for maintaining buoyancy, because people are more buoyant in salt water than in fresh. So you can descend in the fresh water but then if you aren’t prepared to dump some air out of your buoyancy device you’ll end up stuck in the halocline and just bounce up and down without being able to descend.
Here's me venturing into the dark behind our fearless leader Nico (photo courtesy of Warren McKay)
We surfaced into an air pocket during our second dive at Chac Mool – there were a few holes in the ceiling letting in fresh air so it was safe to take our regulators out of our mouths. There were stalactites hanging from the ceiling numbering in the thousands with a few little bats flying around too. It was utterly quiet – we couldn’t hear the jungle above, there were no waves or wind, no other noises at all. It was surreal and peaceful. I loved it. Our 3rd dive was at Tajma Ha, where we actually toured around 3 different cenotes. My favorite was Esmeralda, there was algae floating on the water there so when the sun shone through it cast beautiful green rays through the water. When I was a little girl I remember loving being at the bottom of a pool when the sun shined in through the hotel or rec center windows and cast rays on the bottom tiles. I loved to see the sun shimmer in the water. It was my happy place. Now, all grown up and a certified diver, I’ve found that place again but its a hundred times better, at the bottom of the sea on the sand dunes or looking up at a cenote with the green jungle foliage peeking in from above.
On Friday we headed out with Nico to Dos Ojos, which is Spanish for Two Eyes as there are 2 cenotes close together. Our first dive there took us along a very dark, enclosed “cave-y” route. There were many times where I’d have to look all around me and then only find a tiny sliver of light off in the distance. It was very different than the previous routes we’d done where we stayed near the cenote entrances and all the light. I found it claustrophobic, I worked hard to keep the fear out but felt it creeping in on me throughout that dive. We made our way to the Bat Cave – another air pocket, this one bigger than the first but, as its name implies, there were lots of bats hanging from the ceiling. I was so relieved to reach this pocket because it meant I could take my mask off, spit my reg out, and take some nice slow deep breaths. It was a needed reprieve from the route we’d dived to reach it. My mom, who is very claustrophobic, would have hated this particular experience. Cavern diving is pretty awesome, and only 1 of our 6 dives had me feeling closed in and frightened. That’s not too bad a ratio I think. With all the new experiences I’ve been having as a diver, every now and then something is bound to scare me. Our second dive at Dos Ojos was much more enjoyable, much more open, more light, and choc full of beautiful stalactite and stalagmite formations. It was stunning. There aren’t very many fish in the cenotes, but we did see lots of tiny catfish with long whiskers that seemed to like hanging out in the beams from our flashlights. My favorite though were the little silver fish – they were about the length of my pinky finger but our lights cast their larger than life shadows onto the rocks all around. It was especially funny when the fish got startled by their own shadows and swam about in a frenzy until they realized it was just them and not some bigger fish out looking for lunch. Too cute.
Nico & I (photo courtesy of Warren McKay)
Dos Ojos is where IMAX filmed Journey Into Amazing Caves, and running off the cavern line (to ensure you don’t get lost, all cavern and cave diving is done following lines) was the “imax” line. Basically its the route that the IMAX film follows in the movie. I have yet to see this movie, but now I definitely need to! If you’ve seen it, let me know how it was would ya? The cavern line was called the Barbie line….because halfway through there’s a barbie tied to the line with an alligator toy eating her. Nico hasn’t been able to find out who put it there or why, but it is certainly a strange and silly sight. To finish off our cenote experience we dove Grand Cenote.
danger will robinson (photo courtesy of Warren McKay)
The Barbie line (photo courtesy of Warren McKay)
We’re now settled into the Blue Angel Resort in Cozumel Mexico and it felt very much like coming home! This is where my journey as a diver began last January and also where I met Warren. Its been an amazing year since then and it feels great to be back here with good friends and familiar faces. Once again its pre-dinner pina colada time…so buenas noches amigos!
PS – you can find more cenote pictures on Warren’s website, they’ll be up just as soon as I stop hogging his computer to write this post so he can upload them…
As is always the case with a vacation, I can’t even believe we’ve reached the end of our time here on Cayman Brac. Has it really been over a week already?!? We have our 2 morning boat dives tomorrow and then it’ll be time for us to dry out so we’re ready for our flight to Cancun on Thursday. Drying out is both literal (our gear) and figural (our bodies need time to off gas excess nitrogen before we hop onto a plane because flying after diving can cause whatever nitrogen is left to leave solution and wreak havoc on our tissues). I took a break and skipped the afternoon dive today. I’m already regretting it as I write this but I do believe I needed a little break. The problem with skipping a dive is you never know if that will be the one where something unbelievably awesome happens like a dolphin encounter or more sharks! Is it terrible of me to hope that Warren had a great dive but not TOO great of a dive??
"the pool is open"
We had 3 more lovely dives yesterday. Our first dive was at West Chute – a deep wall tour started it out and then we hopped over to the 60ft depth area where we had an incredible encounter with a Hawksbill turtle. It was just Warren and I around and he must not have found us too intimidating because he cruised around us doing laps for at least 3 or 4 minutes. Warren swears he was posing for the camera and generally being a huge flirt. Turtles are usually on the shy side, and it stresses them out to chase them or try to force an encounter. We just hung neutral in the water, made no effort to get closer to him at all, and he kept right on showing us his best sides. It was a very special moment and it warms my heart just to think of it again. Shortly after the turtle we saw an enormous (about 6ft long) green moral eel out cruising on the bottom looking for a new hole to call home. It’s very easy to forget just how huge those creatures are when you’re only seeing their heads peeking out from a crevasse. If you’re having trouble picturing it just think of The Little Mermaid. The two eel sidekicks of the octopus villain (her name escapes me at the moment) are morays. Of course, they aren’t naturally evil and sneaky looking!
green moray eel, looking for some real estate (picture courtesy of Warren McKay)
We spent a long time down at West Chute, our max depth was 92ft and we stayed for 48 mins – we were both within 2 or 3 minutes of our no decompression (no deco) limit. The no deco limit is the number a dive computer displays that tells you the maximum amount of minutes you are physiologically allowed to stay at a certain depth before your body will have accumulated too much nitrogen to be able to ascend directly to the surface. We only do recreational diving which means that we try to never exceed the ‘no deco’ limits – we may safely ascend directly to the surface at any point in our dive. I’ve mentioned the safety stop before (stopping an ascent between 20 and 15ft to hover for 3 minutes to off gas) in a previous post; it’s just general procedure for being extra conservative when it comes to avoiding being ‘bent’, or getting decompression sickness. Theoretically speaking, in recreational diving, you could safely skip the safety stop at any time. Basically, we completely maximized the time we could spend at depth on that dive. Then, we had a relatively short surface interval on the boat between dives. A surface interval is the time you spend out of the water between dives. The longer it is, the longer you can then be at depth for on the next dive. This is due to your residual nitrogen load – after a dive there is residual nitrogen in your system that didn’t leave during the ascent and safety stop and the only way to get rid of it is to wait. If you go back in before it’s all gone (which is always the case if you’re doing multiple dives in a day) then your next dives will all have to be shallower or shorter (usually, they’re both).
We were only out of the water for an hour and 3 minutes after West Chute and then we went back in for a dive on Tarpon Reef. There were about a dozen tarpon around this site and this was the first time I’ve ever seen one. They resemble a great barracuda but are quite a bit bigger.
A tarpon - about 3ft in length (picture courtesy of Warren McKay)
One of the newer dive staff gave us the site briefing and unfortunately it left something to be desired. It really didn’t provide us much of an overview of the site, how to navigate it, or what depths to expect. I checked my computer to see how much time I’d have at 40 to 50 ft because that was what all of our previous afternoon dives had been and saw that I had about half an hour of no deco time. The best parts of the site turned out to be at 60ft though. Into the water we went. It was an awesome dive, even with a strong current to fight! Menne sent me into a small hole in the reef and then surprised all the tarpon hiding inside from the surge and they all came out around me. Then I drifted into their midst by being very still in the water and just letting the surge gradually push me closer. I got right into the thick of it for a nice close look at them! VERY cool! But I was so totally absorbed in the encounter that I neglected to keep a close enough eye on my remaining no deco time…I heard a beep and looked down at my wrist just in time to see the no deco number hit 0. Shit. Uh oh. Does that mean what I think it means?? I quickly looked up at Warren, who was being a better diver than I and staying shallower, swam over and showed him my computer. He laughed, which made his mask flood, and then shook his finger at me. I felt thoroughly ashamed of myself. I’d broken an important rule in recreational scuba diving. My computer then told me to start ascending and that I would be obligated to wait an additional minute at my safety stop. Basically, I could no longer go straight to the surface safely as my chances of getting bent were too high. I was lucky that all I had accumulated was 1 minute of decompression time, and I was also lucky that while I hadn’t been watching my depth and no deco time close enough, at least I had been watching my air and I knew I had more than enough to burn the deco time underwater as required.
While I should never have let this happen in the first place, I won’t beat myself up too badly over it. I made a mistake, I’ve recognized the factors that led to it, and I’ve taken some time to reflect on how I can make sure it doesn’t happen again. You can be sure I kept a ridiculously close watch on my computer on all my dives today! There were at least 2 or 3 other people who went into deco on that dive yesterday too, but that doesn’t excuse me in the slightest. The moral of this story is not to assume that just because its shallow that you don’t have to watch your no deco time! Scuba diving is the most fun, exciting, challenging, and rewarding thing I’ve ever done but it won’t be any of those things for very long if I don’t do it safely.
Its 5pm now which means its pre-dinner pina colada time…later gators.
PS – Warren’s photo blog is now up and running and he’s got some truly spectacular underwater pictures that you simply MUST go check out. Go, look around, and marvel at the weird, beautiful and downright cool critters we’ve been hanging out with beneath the waves all week. You can find him at warrenmckay.wordpress.com
We’re all settled in now to the dive life pace in Cayman Brac. We arrived after 3 wonderfully uneventful flights and 1 night in Toronto (where it was -22 degrees celsius by the way) to some rough seas and cold wind. Not the sunshine we had in mind but you take whatever you get on vacation right? After a night of sitting at the bar and wondering where all the other hotel guests were (it is SO quiet and empty here!) we woke up bright eyed and bushy tailed (mostly) for a 7:30am boat briefing. I’ve got to hand it to the Brac Reef Beach – they’re boat briefings are fabulously thorough and safety-oriented. I felt that we were in good hands right away. And when you’re spending all day every day for a week on a boat, in rough seas no less, its good to know the crew can handle anything. They also do this lovely thing called valet diving – I have yet to lift a single tank let alone change tanks between dives. I don’t even have to carry my scuba kit to the back of the boat to put it on before jumping in. I certainly won’t be getting buff arms on this trip!
We’re 15 dives in as I write this (2 dives in the morning and another in the afternoon) and the weather has finally calmed down enough to allow us access to the best sites on the north side of the island. Some dives have been mind blowingly awesome (yes that’s right, I went that far and yes I also know that it is not a word) while others have bordered on pedestrian with most falling somewhere in the middle. All dives are not created equal. Here’s a peek at the most memorable dives thus far.
January 6th – 1st dive of the day
#356 (M.V. Keith Tibbetts wreck) – We took off for the north side of the island for the first time since our arrival. A few of the divers had requested this site as it was the last dive day of their trip. Menne (our awesome dive master) obliged despite the rough swells and we all hung on tight. I looked out at the waves and wondered how exactly I was going to manage to climb back up on the boat. This was also to be my first wreck dive, and also the first dive of my wreck specialty. My task was to navigate Warren and I around the wreck and then back to our starting point to find the boat. Pretty easy as it turned out, just keep the ship on your right on the way out then round the bow and keep it on your left all the way back. We reached a maximum of 88ft and stayed for 43 minutes. This was a stunningly gorgeous site. The Keith Tibbetts is a Russian warship stationed in Cuba during the Cold War. It never saw action, and was eventually sold to Cayman Brac and sunk as an artificial reef. It has been underwater now for 15 years, longer than it ever floated on the surface. Its back half sits upright in the sand and the other half was torn off and lists to the port side. Almost as commanding a sight as the wreck was the hundreds upon hundreds of splendid garden eels swaying in the surge in the sand fields on both sides of the ship, as far as the eye could see with a dark blue horizon drawing a stark line against the white sand. It was truly breath taking, and I don’t use the term lightly. I didn’t take my camera on this dive as my focus was accomplishing my training task but I hope we can revisit this site before we go. I’d love to be able to share some pictures with you.
2nd dive of the day
Our morning started out with the amazing dive above so I wasn’t expecting this one to be anything super memorable. This dive really caught me off guard! We went to Bermuda Chubb Haven on the south shore of Cayman Brac. The maximum depth was 55ft and our dive lasted 54 minutes. Menne was kind enough to explain how we’d recognize the bermuda chubbs…they’re the ones in the flowery shorts. Menne actually has a website where he sells t-shirts called dumbassdivemaster.com - take a peek! This was the first dive I’ve ever taken a camera on and, as I expected, my buoyancy and air consumption took a big hit. Despite that it was a glorious dive because it was chock full of all the extra cool stuff divers love to see – there was a stingray, green sea turtle that came within a few feet of us, and several great barracuda. I also got the video from the previous post about lion fish from this dive. Whenever a DM kills a lion fish, the grouper aren’t far behind to gobble it up. On this day, one in particular was so close that Menne herded him at us so we could pet him. (I can practically see my instructor Kari cringing at this, we’re not supposed to touch the marine life! Sorry Kari, at that point the grouper was so up in my mask I either pet him and let Menne carry on elsewhere or risk him petting me).
Menne carried that dead lion fish around on his spear for the remainder of the dive and near the end he sliced it into 2 pieces, stuffed one into an octopus den and left the other at the base of a nearby coral pinnacle. We were all then quite surprised to see a queen trigger fish begin picking at the carcass (we had no idea they eat lion fish! But the more fish that do, the better). Watching the food chain at work is always interesting, and not a minute later the very top of that food chain came into view. A black tipped reef shark, about 5ft in length, came swooping in to steal the carcass from the trigger fish and then cruised around the pinnacle for a pretty solid 30 seconds or so. It is absolutely awesome to see such a powerful creature in its natural environment exhibiting normal behaviors. We all know sharks are the top dog in the ocean – but watching one in action just really hammers that home. He moved so smoothly, so powerfully, so much faster than anything else I’ve seen underwater. I was awestruck and just pleased as punch to have front row seats to the show. Warren on the other hand, decided to see how close that shark would let him drift in. 15ft as it turns out, and then with a quick swish of his tail he was out of sight in a split second. The diver visible in the video is Warren by the way. Don’t bother ladies, he’s taken ;)
January 7th – 1st dive of the day
Cemetery Wall – I hit a maximum depth of 97ft (that just shy of 10 stories underwater, for reference) which was a new personal depth limit (didn’t last long, I set a new one the next day). We hoped into relatively calm seas and began our descent right away. We started our dive under the boat at the mooring line and headed straight out towards the deep to the edge of the wall. I peered over the coral at about 75ft and saw nothing – complete and total nothingness, just endless deep dark blue sea. Now THAT is a seriously intimidating sight! I wondered what might be watching me from the depths. My breath caught in my throat and I quickly pushed that thought out of my head. The golden rule of scuba diving is never to hold your breath, always breathe. That is sometimes easier said than done. They say that for every shark you see on a dive, there’s probably 3 or 4 that saw you…
We dropped down over the wall and I kept my eyes glued to the reef, avoiding at all cost glances to my left at the open ocean or down to the depths. There were all sorts of incredible critters and corals to hold my attention, and about 8 enormous groupers aggressively following our dive master Menne waiting for him to spear a lion fish they could gobble up. He rough housed with them the way you would a pet dog and occasionally had to push them away. We saw a gorgeous green sea turtle too. I was fairly nervous on this portion of the dive. I’m becoming more and more comfortable with deeper dives, and no longer becoming anxious about my air consumption or feeling claustrophobic (diving is really teaching me how to conquer fear) but there just happened to be a newly certified diver on this tour who was literally on her first dive since certifying a day earlier. In my humble opinion, she might have been wiser to respect PADI’s guideline of not exceeding 60ft depth limit at her experience level (which is to say, none). She was right down at 97ft with me and I kept thinking to myself “please don’t run out of air, please don’t get narced, please don’t get freak out, please control your buoyancy” and so on. As a newly trained rescue diver my head kept going to the many problems that could easily arise in this situation and I knew that I might have to step up if something went wrong. Luckily everything went perfectly fine, but I was rather uncomfortable with my new awareness of all the scary possibilities her presence at that depth created.
We came up a bit to 85ft and started into a swim through – a short tunnel through the reef with an overhead environment (no direct access to the surface) that curved up quite steeply to 60ft. Warren ducked in ahead of the group to follow Menne and I was right behind him. We surprised a sleeping nurse shark, taking shelter from the surge, who quickly made a beeline for the exit as Warren’s camera flash was going off. I looked up and time just s t o p p e d . The silt of the tunnel was swirling up and glowing orange from the flash and then this shape appeared out of the cloud and headed right for me. The shark swam right past me, easily within arm’s reach. Those are the moments I live for as a diver. It felt like slow motion but was probably only 3 seconds. Best 3 seconds of my day.
Warren's awesome picture - the flash sent this baby nurse shark straight at me
January 8th – 3rd dive of the day
Warren and I were the only divers on the boat for this afternoon dive. We had a 46t boat all to ourselves. Very spacious. By this point in our trip Menne has a fairly good grasp on what kind of divers we are and what we can and can’t handle. He suggests, if we’re game, we grab some Nitrox tanks (room air is 21% O2 and 79% nitrogen and that’s what’s in a regular scuba cylinder. Because the amount of nitrogen your body absorbs at depth limits the time you can spend there safely, we can extend our bottom times by decreasing the content of nitrogen in the gas we’re breathing, which thereby increases the oxygen content. I do have the special training for this but had yet to actually dive a tank of it) and head out North into the rougher swells, drop down over another deep wall and just drift for as long as the air will last us. He’ll pick us up when we surface. Normal procedure is for the divers to navigate themselves back to the boat underwater and then surface near it as the boat remains moored throughout the dive. Obviously, Warren and I were totally game for this plan!
It was a glorious dive that started out at a site called Knuckles Wall. I reached a maximum of 86ft and lasted 54 minutes. We drifted along the wall, saw 2 green sea turtles back to back, at least 7 lion fish kills (which means we also had an escort of groupers!), a few hog fish, a baby queen angelfish, a queen angel fish, an arrow crab (super cute little guy with bright purple pinchers), stingray and a group of barracuda. We also checked out a small ship wreck in the sand just over the wall. It was fabulous to be the only ones in the water, it felt like the whole ocean was our playground. There was also a tight little swim through near the wall, and I always love a good swim through. This was another “this is why I dive” kind of dive. Bliss……
Grouper looking for lion fish handouts
one of many hawksbill turtles
Here's me, crusing along
The ‘pedestrian’ dives:
Don’t get me wrong, we’ve had plenty of great dives here on the Brac. But when you do this many of them, you can’t help but rank some over others, or find you have difficulty recalling some without refreshing yourself on the details in your logbook. The other dives we did were all to fairly similar sites (coral fingers and pillars spread out in the sand). Some of the creatures we’ve seen include angel fish, butterfly fish, parrot fish, trigger fish, moral eels, yellow headed jaw fish, porcupine fish, squirrel fish, needle fish, honeycomb cow fish, damsel fish, goat fish, spotted drum fish and some banded coral shrimp. I’ll be posting a gallery with some pictures of all those guys soon. Warren has also started up a photography blog and he’s got tons of amazing underwater shots from our dives so the link to that page will be coming soon too. Be sure to look at my pictures first and then be blown away by his….if you do it in reverse mine will seem rather sad! Its quite challenging to operate a camera well underwater, and I was never much of a photographer to begin with, but I’m continue to learn every dive!
If you happen to be wondering what else we’re doing here other than diving, I can clear that up quite easily. Nothing. No, seriously. We’re on the morning boat by 8:15am after a quick breakfast, we get back to port at about 12:30, scarf down some lunch, log our dives and maybe catch 20 mins of either a nap or some sunshine out on the beach and then its back to the boat for the afternoon dive. Then its time to shower off, sit around at the bar, log more dives, have some dinner and get to bed early. Diving all day is rather exhausting! But I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Lion fish are everywhere here in the Caribbean, but they aren’t supposed to be. They’re a venomous fish with showy black, white and red stripes and spiky fin rays. They native to the Indo-Pacific region but were unintentionally introduced to the Atlantic in the 90s and have since become a huge problem for Caribbean reefs as well as the East Coast of the United States. How they got here is widely speculated – one theory is that they were released from a private aquarium and another places the blame on Hurricane Andrew. Who knows. They have no natural enemies in the Atlantic though and so the population has exploded. This is problematic because they eat the young of many native fish species and those populations are now in serious decline. As you can imagine, this has serious implications for the health of Atlantic marine ecosystems. One effect of this is decreased economic value in terms of tourist dollars – divers travel to places with healthy and abundant reefs. Lion fish are territorial and aggressive and their stings can cause vomiting, fever, sweating and in rare cases even death….all in all very problematic! In an effort to control lion fish populations many divers are now actively killing them throughout their dives. Lion fish derbies with prize money for the most lion fish kills are not uncommon either.
Lion fish - photo courtesy of Warren McKay
Here in Cayman Brac some diver masters at our resort carry spears and knives and once killed they leave the lion fish on the reef as the groupers have started to eat them. I knew all of this before arriving here but had never actually seen anyone kill one. That changed on our 2nd dive of our 1st dive day! Our DM (dive master) Manny speared and sliced up 2 of them. I started to feel sorry for this rather intimidating looking fish but then tried to remember he’s doing the reef a favor. They don’t belong here, and they’ve caused enough havoc as it is. He’s just restoring some balance to the environment. It still seems like such a departure from the usual diver attitude of ‘don’t touch anything, don’t harass anything, and don’t leave anything behind but your bubbles’ though. It’ll certainly take some getting used to. Often the dead lion fish are used in cooking too – they’re apparently quite tasty once all the venomous bits are removed. Today Manny killed another one and then carried it around on his spear for a portion of the dive looking for something to feed it to. He cut it into two pieces, stuffed half into an octopus den and left the other at the bottom of a coral head. Not more than a minute or two later a gorgeous queen trigger fish swooped in started picking at it (which was very exciting because they’re not known to eat lion fish!) but was quickly interrupted by a black tipped reef shark who made fast work of what was left of the carcass. I’ll post the shark video with my next post but for now here’s a video of the lion fish slaughter.
Happy (almost) New Year everyone! Hope you’re all ready for the challenges and adventures that await in 2012! First up for me is my very favorite adventure – the diving variety – and it starts in 3 days. My next post will be about some actual diving (finally). My intention when I started this blog was to use it as a glorified logbook but I’ve found I enjoy it so much that its been put to wider use. Writing about diving, traveling, training (and all of the planning and anticipation that goes along with the aforementioned diving and traveling) keeps me excited, energized, and even organized. I love sharing this passion for the ocean with all of you!
I’d also like to share this excellent website – the newly launched Blue Angel Scuba School where you can read more about the Cozumel Beach Clean-up event I’m involved in as well as all about the school. Take a peek folks. We got some exciting news yesterday about the clean-up too. My favorite local dive shop here in Edmonton, Ocean Sports, has sponsored our clean-up event by contributing mesh drawstring bags that we’ll be handing out to trip participants to take on the week’s diving. In addition to our afternoon beach outing we’re also going to be cleaning up the underwater world throughout our dives. The mesh bags are an excellent and easy way to pick up garbage when we see it, and they’re also easy to tuck away into a pocket until needed. This is a perfect example of why Ocean Sports is such an amazing place, they really go above and beyond your expectations! THANK YOU OCEAN SPORTS!! The bags will be reused on other Atkins Scuba trips and Warren and I are planning to start using ours right away in Cayman Brac as well as everywhere else we go diving.
A truly awesome contribution from Ocean Sports!
Here’s the event poster I made too (exact beach and time are still to be determined):
our rockin' flyer!
And now I’d like to leave you with this little gem – a clip from one of my favorite movies (Finding Nemo for those of you who’ve missed out)…just for kicks.
