First 3 Adventure Dives

We did our Advance certification with this dive shop.  It is one of the most popular, and busiest, shops in town.

Monday November 24, 2014

I didn’t last long studying last night, so I woke up early and was able to finish my first three courses:  Deep dive, buoyancy control and night dive.  To obtain the “Advanced Open Water Diver” level, five adventure dives need to be completed, including Navigation and Deep, then three others from a choice of many options.  Our additional three were buoyancy, wreck and night dives.

Off we went to the Coconut Tree Dive Shop to start our advanced course dives.  Tom was our instructor.  He is from London and has been here in Roatan for a number of years.  He reviewed our required skills with us then took us diving.  

Mama Kitty and three of her kittens hang out at the shop.  We spayed her at our clinic.  Hopefully all the new kitten families will get them done at the March clinic!

Our boat to go to the dive sites.

All prepped and ready to go!

The first dive of a multi-dive day has to be the deepest dive, so that was our first class dive.  We did the dive at “West End Wall”.  Normal recreational diving allows you to go to a depth of 60”.  Deep diving is 60-130’.  Deep diving allows you to observe different aquatic life, visit wrecks and do more photography.  We went down to about 100 feet and had to do tasks to test for signs of nitrogen narcosis, which is the intoxicating effect nitrogen produces when you breathe it under pressure.   Many of the symptoms are similar to being drunk.  

There are hundreds of dive sites around Roatan!

Nitrogen narcosis itself won’t hurt you, the hazard come from the way a diver may behave under its effects that is the problem.  We carried little plastic slates on the dive and one task was to look at the colors on the slate and write down the colors as we perceived them.  Pencils write on the plastic slate under water just fine!  

The Lion Fish is a beautiful fish, but it has invaded the Caribbean, has no enemies and is killing all the native animals.  There is open season at all times to kill these fish.  The meat is served in restaurants and is very tasty.

All of the underwater photos are taken from the internet.  We did not have underwater cameras on our dives.

We practiced simple tasks on the surface, then we did the tasks at depth to compare the results.  Sandy and I did fine, no signs of being “narked”! 

After we completed all of our tasks, we just continued to have a nice dive.   We were down for 56 minutes.

After our proper interval at the surface, it was time for our second dive:  Peak Performance Buoyancy which we did at “Moonlight” site.  Buoyancy is very important, it is surprising that it is not required.  It allows the diver to move through the water gracefully, they seem to ascend, stop, hover and descend at will with hardly a fin flick or hand wave, as if they think it and it happens.  Good buoyance control saves the diver energy and air and makes diving more fun.

Trumpet fish

 This was really fun.  We had to do more tasks including swimming through hoops and knocking over little weights with our regulators.    It is a lot harder than it looks!  All the control is through breathing: inhale to rise, exhale to descend.  Super finely tuned.  We were only down at 26’ for 53 minutes.  One of the highlights was seeing a nurse shark!!

Tom Crow was our divemaster and teacher.  He was a very good instructor and a lot of fun!

When we returned to the shop, we got the message that Al and Sandra were planning to have lunch in town and hoped we could join them!!  We had a nice lunch of Thai food at Café Escondido.  It was a wonderful visit and we were quite honored that they thought of us and wanted to spend more time together!

After lunch we wandered through town and saw Kecia and her kids!

Sites around town.

We had the afternoon off, but by the time we had lunch and did a couple of little things, we did not have time to go back to our bungalow.  Glad I finished my homework this am!  Tom went over our knowledge reviews and then it was time to gather on the boat for our night dive!!

Normally night dives are done Tuesdays and Thursdays.  But bad weather is forecasted to come in on Wednesday, so the night dive was moved up to Monday.  That works well for us!

The only street in "downtown" West End.  Sometimes it gets really packed with taxis and other vehicles.

We went to “Lighthouse” for this dive.  It is very cool to dive at night!  It is very exciting and relaxing.  You get to see different animals at night: lobsters and octopus are out at night.  Also some of the plants look different at night.  Many of the colors are brighter at night.  There are also bioluminescent creatures at night.  It was really neat.  The coolest was the octopus.  Talk about a “shape changer”!  Quite amazing to watch!

"String of Pearls" which are glowing little creatures

Luminescence!

Basket Star: looks like a plant but is really an animal!

After being down for 62 minutes, we finally boarded the boat back to the dock.  What a day!!

We went dinner with Harmony for our last night together.  We went to the Coconut Tree restaurant.  She had lobster and Sandy and I had shrimp meals.  They were pretty good.

Harmony's last dinner in Roatan.

I needed to do my other two lessons, but apparently I sprawled out on the bed and passed out.  Sandy ended up turning out the lights and I woke up to go to bed later!!! 

More diving tomorrow!!