On Wednesday morning, the boat from Tech Asia picked us (and
more importantly our gear) up from the resort. It was just a couple minutes ride over there,
but I guess they thought this was the easiest way to move the gear. We walked up to the shop, and met our guide,
Ferg. He told us we would be diving with
another GUE diver, Steve, who showed up shortly after us. It turns out (though we didn’t realize this
until later) we had met Steve in Florida before. Steve has done all of the dives in the area
before many many times, so it was basically like having two guides. We ended up doing a dive in the morning and a
dive in the afternoon.
For the morning dive, we went to a site called Deep Monkey
Wreck, which has a series of walls in the 18/45 range. And then we would work our way up the reef
(if the currents behaved) and deco all the way up the reef. Woohoo.
After a briefing with a chalkboard and everything, we loaded up our gear
(well actually WE didn’t load anything) and got going. The boat we were on was a smaller version of
one of those outrigger boats. It was a
nice spacious ride, but rolling off of the side was a bit nerve-wracking, at
least the first time, for two reasons.
First, it is pretty high off of the water. Second, there are those outriggers, which I
was afraid of hitting on the way down (yes, I know that's ridiculous).
Actually there was a third thing too.
We were diving with scooters (Gavins, barf), and the usual protocol is
to sit the scooter on the rail next to you, clip it to you, and then roll in
with your hand on the strap. I noted
that I had never rolled into the water with my scooter before, and was given
the option to have it handed down instead.
While mulling that over, I asked what would happen if I somehow screwed
up the roll-in-with-scooter maneuver. I
was assured that the worst that would happen would the scooter would land on my
head, so I decided to go for it. In all,
over the course of the trip, I rolled in off of that boat 4 times with a
scooter. I think the scooter landed on
me at least twice, but much more impressively, on at least two of the dives, I
did a complete 360 underwater before popping back to the surface.
Anyhoo, back to the dive.
The dive ended up being a little shallower than I expected; I don’t know if we dropped in a different
spot, or just didn’t cover as much ground as expected. My scooter turned out to be a bit
mis-weighted, so that when it was running, the handle was about 30 degrees off
from where I would like it. So that took
a little getting used to. We were
initially over a slopey area, and then ended up on a wall, though it wasn’t a
very tall wall (by local standards anyway).
The thing I found noteworthy about the site was that it was covered with
sea whips (I think that’s what they are called… the things that stick out and
look like fat pipe cleaners). I was terrified of a sea whip versus scooter
incident, so I was giving them quite a bit of space :P Those were there on the slope and on top of
the wall. Once we got to the wall, there
were also some really big sea fans along the side of the wall. Eventually we turned around and headed back
the way that we came. Rob kept making me
pose behind sea fans, which was tricky with the current. I would scooter way up current and then get
in position and drift along and hope he could get a shot or two before
scootering back up-current and doing it all over again. As promised, we deco’d up the reef. And I got to enjoy crinoids in every freakin’
color of the rainbow. I love crinoids!
After lunch at El Galleon resort, which is like a 2 minute
walk from the dive shop, we met up again
in the afternoon, and went back out for another dive in the same depth
range. This site was called Sweet Lips
Corner, and featured a neat swimthrough with lots of sweetlips congregating at
the exit. We dropped in fairly shallow
water, and then scootered down a long gradual slope, and eventually hit a
dropoff. After following along this
dropoff for a bit, we found the swimthrough which went into the wall, then
there was a sharp turn to the right, and it came out on the other side of a
bend along the wall. I swam into it
first, and once I got to the area where it turned, I looked out and saw a bunch
of fish congregating at the exit. I
figured if I swam out, it would disturb them, so I turned around and went back
out, and told Rob to go through first.
He swam in and was in there forever and ever and didn’t end up taking
pictures of the fish. Not sure why. Eventually I went back through and posed for
pictures at the exit. By this point the
fish had mostly scattered, so they aren’t really evident in the picture. Once we headed up the slope to start our deco,
we found ourselves in a howling current.
It was crazy. Until we got up to
about 20 or 30 feet, we were just flying over the reef, which was fairly
barren. I entertained myself by videoing
us being dragged along. When we got to
30 feet, some patches of reef appeared, and then it was denser at 20 feet. The current also died down, so we could
actually swim around looking at critters.
We made plans to meet again in the morning for some more
diving, and we walked back to Atlantis (which was an 8 to 10 minute walk along
the water).
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