We moved to San Salvador overnight. The morning dives were at North Pole Cave, so named because there is a "chimney" from about 60 feet (the top of the wall) down to 110 feet. Actually the chimney goes all the way down to 140 feet, but there is an exit at 110. The chute was fun, especially watching people descend into it ahead of me. Well, I watched Rob (the DM) and Rob descend into it, and since they both had excellent trim/buoyancy, they looked very graceful like they were free falling into it. On the second dive, I went first, and I was having some serious ear problems on the descent, which was accompanied by some flailing. So I probably didn't look nearly as cool as them :) We saw an eel hanging his head out of a hole in the wall, and I found a scorpion fish. And a huge barracuda. I always thought of barracuda as being scary big, with scary big teeth, but when I saw them in Bonaire I was pretty unimpressed. The barracudas in the Bahamas are much more impressive.
After lunch, we went to Shades of Blue, which was one of my favorite sites. The boat was moored at the edge of the wall, but the boat itself was hanging over the abyss (it was 250' under the boat). So we had to swim over the abyss to get to the site. When Rob clipped off his camera and let it hang, I could see the fear in his eyes -- maybe he hadn't clipped it off properly and it was going to drop in 250' of water. The visibility was excellent here -- you could see so far down the wall and off of the wall. And it was a very deep shade of blue. We saw a turtle who was pretty cooperative for the camera, a shy nurse shark (my first!), 2 lionfish hanging out together (also my first), some flamingo tongues, an ocean triggerfish (which I liked a lot, since they remind me of mola molas). And of course tons of fish in the shallows and at the edge of the wall. When we got back near the boat, there was a grey reef shark hanging out near the boat, which we were checking out during our 10 and 20 foot stops.
On the night dive, we saw a tiny squid in midwater on the way to the wall. We also saw several small jellyfish that looked like red spot comb jellies, they looked like they had a row of flashing red lights on their sides. Bob claims he got attacked (well, nipped) by a flying fish on the way up around 10 feet. I didn't see the fish, because Rob's reaction to it was to flail around and blind me with his light :) Rob the DM kept seeing flying fish on the surface but everytime he tried to show me, they would disappear. So he finally found one for me, which had beached itself in the chase boat. Those things are pretty neat.
