scuba – Art’s Travel Adventures

Today we finally went scuba diving! And it was incredible.

I was concerned they weren’t going to take Matt since he hasn’t been diving for some time but his pool refresher course got him in easily. For me they weren’t having it. I thought my last dive was around 3 years ago and they require a refresher if it’s been that long.(I looked at my calendar when I got home. It’s only been since March of 2022.) I accepted it and apologied to Matt. I made one more attempt mentioning quietly that I’ve been diving for 25+ years and my last dive was an advanced dive. (See Maui 2022 Blog.)

The dive master cam over and quizzed me a bit and could see I knew what I was doing. He said we were good to go. YAY!!

The little boat that came to BluZen to pick us up.

It was a reasonable sized group for this boat. 8 divers plus the guides and the crew. Everyone was super friendly.

We headed out to the Esmeralda Dive Site off of San Pedro. The barrier reef acts as a…barrier…so the water inside is quite calm. We headed outside of the reef where the waves were sometimes 8-9’ high. I don’t get motion sickness, fortunately.

The first dive was great. We went down 86’ and swam around what the guides were calling finger coral formations. Basically, mountains of coral fingering out and sand space in between that kind of looks like your hand spread out on a table. Only…bigger.

Nurse Shark on the sand in between the “fingers.”

The second dive was amazing. There were times I couldn’t figure out where to point my camera.

Lobster and nurse shark

Big Grouper

That grouper was huge. Probably the size of my torso. Matt liked his expression and I thought he should have a cigar hanging out the corner of its mouth.

At the end of the 2nd dive a remora (the kind of fish that attaches to sharks) got friendly with us, trying to attach to my chest.

Remora

Three feet long? Maybe longer. Really sharp looking teeth and a sneaker tread on the top of its head. Neat experience.

Here’s a bunch of the things we saw including a really big reef shark and nurse sharks that seemed like they just wanted to swim around with us.

Sharks and fish and sharks

The second dive was certainly in my top 5 diving experiences.

In between the two dives we stopped at San Pedro for our surface interval. Matt and I walked around a bit and bought a couple of trinkets and chilled. I’m glad we didn’t stay in San Pedro. Too many people. Too gritty. Too touristy for me.

We made it back to the room around 1:30pm and I ordered a room service pizza so I could watch the men’s Olympic basketball gold match. Then it was nap time. Diving puts a lot of nitrogen in your blood and that makes me tired. Scuba naps are the best.

We went to dinner at the Lotus Restaurant here at BluZen and I had a delicious batch of fish and chips. I booked more diving for tomorrow so I went to bed kind of early.

Diving was one of my big goals for this trip. Mission accomplished. More tomorrow.

Thanks for following along!

So, I get COVID brain for a few weeks after I get COVID. A general fogginess where it’s difficult to focus for long and tasks take me a while longer than normal. (Unpacking here took an hour. Part of that was the excitement of being here and part C-Fog.) The fog gradually lifts over the course of a few weeks. I wanted to see how I did in the water just snorkeling before I did any diving. Scuba diving is very fun and relaxing but not a good place to be if you’re not at 100%.

I am happy to report I did great. Alert, aware and strong. I’ve been swimming all summer long and really felt the cardio fitness. We swam a ton while snorkeling, more than I would ever swim while diving, and it was easy. I’m ready to dive.

Since the resort is a little isolated the snorkel boat can right to the private dock to pick me up. (Sweet.) we headed to the marine reserve and jumped in at a spot called Shark and Ray Alley. This is part of the 2nd largest barrier reef in the world and the Alley is a break in the barrier where fishing boats used to come and clean their catch. That would attract Nurse Sharks and Sting Rays and they are still coming today. The Nurse Sharks, docile bottom feeders according to our guide, were pretty big.

Watching the sharks and rays circling our boat.

The largest Nurse Shark I saw was around 7-8’ long. The Rays were beautiful and would just come swimming by. I’m still not sure why but we weren’t allowed to use fins while swimming in The Alley but we weren’t. Probably stir up too much sand? The water was shallow enough to stand in.

Caye Caulker Snorkeling, maybe watch til the end…?

We made two more stops along the reef outside of the reserve. Coolest thing I saw from those two stops was a big green Moray Eel as seen in the video above.

If you watched the video to the end you saw me feeding the Tarpon. This, I guess, was part of the 1/2 day adventure package. “Feed the fish” they said. “It will be fun” they said.

Feeding the Tarpon my hand.

You’ll notice the Tarpon engulfed my entire hand. As a puppeteer, that’s concerning. Fortunately, Tarpon don’t have teeth. Well, they do but they are like sandpaper. So my hand got sandpapered. It didn’t hurt until I used hand sanitizer to clean it. That hurt.

Healing nicely. I’m pretty sure that fish has a taste for human flesh now.

Matt and Lilli arrived around 3:30pm.

We hung out by the pool for a while and then headed over to the pizza place for some food and fun. We spent the rest of the evening watching the USA Men’s basketball team come back and win against Serbia in the semi-finals round. (Not really a sports guy but I’ve really enjoyed the men and women’s basketball matches. Games? Matches? Again, not a sports guy.)

A really nice day.

Thanks for following along!

Tag: scuba

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