Scuba!
Trip Start
Dec 20, 2008
1
16
17
Trip End
Jan 11, 2009
San Pedro, Belize
Friday, January 9, 2009
That's all we've been doing for the past three days, and its been very cool. I think the last time I wrote we were on our way to our night dive, which was just incredible. Incredibly incredible. We saw octopi (octopuses?), parking lots full of rays, tons of really big eels. In general it was just very good. Then we got up at 5 am the next morning and went on a trip out to the blue hole. If you don't know the blue hole used to be a cave, and the ceiling colapsed in. Then the oceans rose again and there is basically a giant sink hole in the ocean, with stalactites and stalagmites at the bottom. It was the deapest dive we've done yet, about at the recreational limits of 135 feet, and you can only go down for like 8 minutes, but it was cool to swim amongst the statactites (the mites are way lower). Then our second dive was to half moon key, and it was just incredible. The vis was perfect, you could see forever, and we just saw a ton of stuff. We were told by some people on the trip with many dives under their belts that this may be the best dive we will ever have. It was just so amazing. Our third dive was to the Spotted Eagle Ray Wall, and onto the the aquarium. This is supposed to be fantastic, and it was good, but I think after the half moon key dive it was a bit of a letdown. But we finally saw a turtle! It was a nice sized, pretty one.
We got home at 5ish and were just exhausted. pretty much ate dinner and collapsed into bed. Though I've gotta note for anyone who comes here in the future who might be a vegetarian---its not so easy to find food out here. We ended up going back to the same restauraunt we went to the first night because we couldn't find anywhere else to go.
Today we did two more local reef dives, both of which were ok, though the vis wasn't great. The second was cool though because the dive masters brought chum and we got to dive with sharks. A swarm of them. And a couple bigger fish like snappers and groupers (we're not positive that they were actually snappers, but I think they were). Even an eel came out to join the party, which was surprising because it didn't run away when people started taking photos of it, and it even let the dive master pet it. We have some pretty good photos from the food orgy :)
The rest of that dive was ok, but at the end we saw another turtle, which was cool, and I think lars got some good pictures of that one.
Tomorrow morning we are off to do one day at Caye Caulker, then we head home. See (some of) you all soon
M
