Naia's Wall

I am writing this report quite a bit after the fact, so I am going to keep it short. Luckily I sent a little blurb to Susan shortly after the dive, so I can crib from that without any degradation of my memory of the dive :) Matt set up a tech trip on the Escapade because apparently there haven't been enough of those lately. I say that quite sarcastically since as it turned out, this would be the first of something like 6 consecutive weekends where I had a tech boat (or two) planned. Matt's plan may have lacked look-ahead. We were shooting for Naia's Wall. Kevin and Rob insisted on planning for a relatively deep average depth, which I just didn't get... the wall goes up to like 70 feet, so why would we want to spend our time deep? But I figured we could always adjust our deco if we ended up shallower (which I definitely expected).

I hadn't been to Naia's wall before, but Rob and Kevin had (when I had an ear infection, whimper, and they left me at home while they went diving!). It is really cool. We basically jetted down to the bottom and were scootering along looking at all of the cool overhangs and stuff near the bottom of the wall. I quickly started to understand why Rob and Kevin insisted that we plan for a deeper dive. The overhangs on the bottom are great to look under, and the fishies seem to congregate there. It wasn't until right near the end when we were swimming about 20' below Clinton's team that I really bothered to look up at the wall, which was definitely the best sight of the whole dive, the wall towering above us, looking like it's about to tip over on top of us. We didn't see anything too spectacular in terms of life but the topography was really cool.

I tried my new (old) 120s yesterday for the first time and they were excellent. It is a relief to finally have found a set of big boy doubles that I feel stable in, since I had written off the heavy 120s and 104s as being not quite right for me. But everything went very smoothly in the lighter 120s. Except I got chastised by one of my team mates for being too slow about putting the bag up :P (as we sat on the reef, not drifting at all at 70', eye roll).

We punted on a second dive. We had the option of going to Ballbuster, but no one except Rob was terribly interested in getting back in. I thought the first dive was so good, it was really unnecessary and it felt a bit rushed since Jim had an afternoon charter. So we decided to go whale watching instead. We eventually found a couple of humpbacks (mom and baby), but first we found a big mola floating on the surface. It was just floating, barely moving, so at first we thought maybe it was injured. But then Rob and I jumped in the water to snorkel with it, and it perked right up once we were annoying it. It was huge. I would have estimated it was about 6' long, but once I was swimming alongside it, it actually seemed quite a bit longer than me. It was awesome swimming along with it.