Days 14 and 15 - July 10th and 11th

Monday went by slowly. We were supposed to go shore diving, but had a bit of an emergency which ended up cancelling the dive. The rest of the day went sort of on hiatus until the evening when several of us went to the Sheraton for the Manta talk.

On Tuesday we had the two dives for my Adv. Open Water certification, the Deep dive and the Navigation dive. We practiced with the compass on land then headed off the to ocean. The deep dive was overall, well a bit of a let down. We had talked about 100ft, and nitrogen narcosis (basically it makes you feel like you're drunk) and what not. Well, we all kinda wanted to feel the onset of that (its supposed to hit around 90ft...or so they say) and I was looking forward to getting to go down 100ft (just so I could say I've been 100ft). Jim had to dive more that evening so it was decided that we shouldn't go that far, so we went 80ft and then we stayed there all of 5 minutes before going shallower for the rest of the dive.

The second dive was more fun, it was supposed to be the navigation, but that didn't happen (at least for me). Jim let us loose with our cameras for the first part and said to meet back when we had 1200psi left in our tanks. I was back with 1500psi, but he was already out of the water, so we just kept swimming around until time was up. It's cool though, I feel pretty comfortable with the compass, and found my way around in the cove (where we hadn't been before) just fine.

The dive itself was cool, it was fairly shallow and good visibility. There was a neat school of Yellow Goatfish hanging around the cove we were in and they didn't scatter when we got near which allowed for lots of photos.

There were lots of fish around and we had a nice long dive (74 minutes) so I got to experiment with the macro on my camera and got a nice picture of Evermann's (or Lobe, i'm not entirely sure) coral.

We got back that evening and the boys and I made dinner and watched a movie until Martina came home then we helped her unpack and started editing from the dive. She had 8 Manta Rays come that night, the video was pretty amazing.