Second Day

I got very lucky on this trip. We arrived right after hurricane Earl made a close pass. By the time we landed two more storms were headed our away. The next day when I woke up I could see that the storms had headed another way or dissipated.

Friday was an instructional dive day for me. Michael and I met up with Cheryl at Cane Bay. First on the agenda was a deep dive.

We went over our dive plans. While on shore Cheryl made us open a combination lock to test our thinking skills on shore vs 100 feet under water.

We entered from the shore and were soon kicking our way to a marker off shore. From there we descended, down a sandy slope through a coral valley and were instructed to land on a sandy ledge. I looked at my depth gauge and we were resting at 99 feet.

Here she tested us by handing off the lock and timing us. I did much better down there than I did on the surface.

We then moved off the ledge and on downward. From this vantage I could look up the sheer coral cliff or down into dark blue and blackness. My dive computer had me at 117 feet.

The second dive was navigational diving. We managed to get where we were going and had some time to play around afterwards.

The final dive was a night dive. I’ve got to tell you I was dreading this.

We suited up at dusk and jumped off the pier backwards. By now it was dark and we fired up our lights and descended.

The beam worked really well down there. The first thing we saw was literally a herd of 9 lobsters. Boy I wish I could have snagged those suckers. We moved on and saw several octopuses, fish, a moray ell, a star fish.

After about 30 minutes Cheryl had us cover our lights and our eyes quickly adjusted to the darkness. Then she moved her hand through the water and it lit up like green stars. Everywhere was bioluminescent organisms. There were thousands of green stars activated by the swipe of a hand or fin. It was amazing like I was in a dream. I forgot for a moment I was under a cruise ship pier in the dark 45 feet down.

There were several snags in this dive. I could feel my tank working loose but I ignored the problem until it actually fell out of the strap on shore. Second, fishermen on the pier started fishing and I actually got caught up in some line but freed myself. And lastly our shore point for our exit was rocky because all the sand had washed away form the last hurricane. It made exit difficult.

2 comments:

Ken said...

No doubt a day you won't soon forget.

Phosphorescence in the water is one of the oceans most beautiful things at night. Flushing the head at night in the dark can be a glowing event.
I've seen what looked like torpedoes, heading straight at my boat in the middle of the night only to find out it was a dolphin lighting up the water.

terri said...

The night dive does sound scary, but clearly, it turned out to be one of the most amazing dives you've had. Wow!