Cruise journal 8: 12/11/07
So… my first set of dives was today and they make me want to be a merman. Whenever I was above water this morning things just went awry, but the dives themselves were spectacular! Anyway, it’s now 5:15pm so I have a whole day to write about. Let’s get started.
The SCUBA excursion went swimmingly, pun intended, although, the boats were very badly organized. We were picked up from a little dock by the cruise ship by a fully equipped dive boat. However, instead of going to our dives we had to head back to the dive shop to get rental equipment for people like me, who don’t want to carry around their own giant BCDs (the jackets) and Regulators (the tubes/gauges). The dive shop doesn’t have its own dock; normally the boat pulls up right to the beach because there’s a sudden drop-off of where the beach goes from about 1 foot deep to 3 feet. However the swells were too rough and the boat was being knocked against the sand so we had to anchor a little further out. This meant wading through 3ft deep waters to get to the dive shop, which wouldn’t be so bad if I’d remembered to take my shorts off (bathing suit underneath) before getting off the boat…. But I didn’t, so I jumped in and got my shorts and half of my shirt soaked. Not only that, but the tide was bringing in a lot of dead coral, which is actually fairly sharp, especially when propelled into someone’s leg by a wave.
Needless to say, the start of the day wasn’t leaving me with high hopes for the dives to come. Luckily, you don’t have to be a good sailor in order to be a good diver, and our instructors were fabulous. Everything from the initial briefing to the finding of reclusive eels went very well when conducted by our “underwater tour guides.” They took our group of 9 divers all over the 2 dive sites like pros… which they were… so that’s good.
The first dive was a reef wall at a maximum depth of 60ft. The coral was beautiful and the dive instructor was able to handle the wildlife, in other words; he could pick up and play with the spider-crabs, coral and other underwater intricacies. There was this living coral that we all got to hold that would latch on to your hand and you could turn it upside down, it felt really weird, like a grandpa who’s trying to chew your hand without his teeth.
The second dive was spectacular, the best wreck dive I’ve been on yet by far. It was 50ft deep, although I probably could have gotten 51ft with a shovel… Anyway, it was the wreck of an old freighter with the hull blown straight open. There was this awesome broken-down crane still attached and we could swim into the hull. Inside there was a small air pocket at the aft of the ship that, although filled with carbon dioxide, still was about 1.5ft of “air” at about 40ft underwater.
We snapped some great pictures of both dives; I’ll make sure to upload them if we ever get the camera back. See, we (my dad and I) accidentally left the camera inside the rental BCD pocket and now it’s in
We got back on the cruise ship at about 1:00pm, but this blog is already a page long so I think I’ll leave off for now. You’ll have to wait for Journal 9 to hear the rest of this afternoon… and probably tonight too. We’re set to have a Guitar Hero contest on a giant screen, so it should be fairly interesting. I miss you all! I love you Brittani! Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera!
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