Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Today started with diving. At the shop at 7:15, and in the water at 9:00 for a brief checkout dive amongst the three of us. Choppy and decent currents, but apparently that's normal this time of year.
The first spot was Seymour (pronounced "see-more") and as the name may suggest, you would expect great visibility and fantastic aquatic life there. Alas, my friends, strike out on both. Visibility changes daily here, with all four main currents in the pacific ocean constantly battling one another here, and today was a low-vis kinda day. We might call it low fidelity at work. You could kinda see shapes of big fish and then the dive master would indicate it was a hammerhead. Sure. Easy for him to say. Now I come home with a great story. I say low visibility, and frankly, I didn't even see the shadow in the distance he was pointing at. Still think he was yanking my chain there... or else I expect to see a school of mating whale sharks tomorrow.
But as I always say: a day under water is better than a day above, and this day was especially good since I got over my sinuses (enough) to go do what I came here to do. The water was cool but not Beluga-cool. The currents were firm, the surge playful, the puffer fish the biggest one I've ever seen in my life. And if that's not enough, I saw my first white tip shark. It's a shark that has, wait for it... wait for it... here it comes... BAM! A white tip. Brilliant. Clearly not named by Darwin, because he comes up with cool names like the blue footed booby bird (I mean, seriously, that's cool, right?). Anyway, with about 12ft visibility, we claimed to have seen many things, and some of it was probably even true. It was a good first dive.
The second dive (Daphne) started off spectacular. We started to descend, were about 10ft on our way down, and all of a sudden this HUGE manta ray comes over to make sure we do things properly and don't mess up his house. I mean, 12ft across, just hanging there, "flying" against the current, probably wondering what on earth motivates us to go down there. We had a good 2 minutes with him/her (I didn't look, that's inappropriate), and (s)he didn't move away from us. Then finally (s)he decided to kind of turn and slowly fly away. Stunning. And this time the visibility was much better (about 40ft), so you can believe me when I say: (s)he was actually there. Then we went down to our bottom depth for this dive (50ft) and ran into 2 white tips (again: sharks with white tips), which we just had to go play with.
Watch the videos! I compiled two from the second dive and those should be uploaded shortly. For the music fanatics, I tried to pick meaningful music and had fun with that, so I'll continue to try to do that for the rest of the trip (although these relatively small videos take FOREVER to upload). If you don't like my selection, turn your sound of. Life really is that simple, dear friends. My mad editing skills will make Justin proud (well, ok, it will probably make him laugh), and I'm proud to have learned it all tonight. It's a MacBook love fest.
After we got home I went for a stroll and I posted some pictures of the local fish market. It's right at the harbor, and they clean the fish on the spot. I don't know who invented the phrase "it takes all kinds", but (s)he was probably at this fish market when (s)he did, because we had all nationalities and several species well represented. It was my first encounter with the aforementioned blue-footed as well as an active (i.e., not sleeping) sea lion - and of course there was a lazy sea lion behind the counter, too. Check out the pics for today.
More to come, tomorrow.
- comments