An ill wind blows...

...and rain, and nasty seaweed, and a whole bunch of flotsam and jetsam.

Here's how it ended last night;  We knew the weather was coming so we sent a boat around to the other side of the island.  And we waited.

Normally the winds come from the east and we, being on the west side of the island, get a nice off shore breeze and the water is calm and the currents are easy to deal with.  Well the predictions were that starting this morning heavy rains, and high winds were coming from the west.  On shore.  The plan for days such as these is to load up all the gear, the tanks, and the divers, in trucks and vans and head to the east side where the water will be calm and the winds less strong.  So that's what we did.

Three days, nine dives, and a lot of time going back and forth across the west end of this beautiful island, and we are back home.  The weather has calmed to just rain and mild seas.  I have a day off and time to do laundry and blog.

When the wind and weather shifts they bring with them sargassum, a seaweed that grows on the surface.  There is a bunch of life growing and living in the seaweed.  Unfortunately when it washes ashore it brings with it all of the human garbage that has been caught up in it.  When it all hits the beach the sargassum and all the biologics die.  The combination of dead and dying sealife and human waste products is a fairly odorous and ugly event.

During the dives on the other side of the island I had an opportunity to practice-lead a dive.  I was joined by my instructor and two other divemasters and they were all going Lionfish hunting.  The Other side has a very different reef structure.  It is mainly a 170 foot wall, topped by a 15 to 20 foot deep plateau.  There is a slight current along the wall so most dives drift along at a predetermined bottom depth and then slowly rise throughout the dive.  Our computers calculate the amount of time our bodies can stay at certain depths and give us second by second updates as we dive.  This is called our NO DECO limits, for no decompression.  If you allow your dive to go beyond your NO DECO limit a mandatory safety stop is required.  Usually a safety stop is three minutes at 15 feet.  After a missed NO DECO, the time is stretched to 8 minutes or perhaps longer.  

I put myself into DECO while leading the dive.  I was not persistent with my divers to get them to follow my lead.  And allowed them to dictate my profile even though I was direct about my goals during the dive briefing.  This was my second dive of the day and I had already gone deep on the first dive.  Also, when we did our safety stop I only stayed for the standard 3 minutes.  Of course my computer wasn't pleased and let me know it by locking me out for 24 hours.  My instructor and the shop owner weren't pleased either and also "locked me out" for 24 hours.  The next day we were back at our shop and had scheduled 4 dives, three day and one night.  I was scheduled to do all four.  With the lockout, I was hopefully going to be able to only get on the night dive.  Night Dive is one of my specialty courses so I was hoping not to miss that one, because we do them so rarely.  This "punishment" taught me a very valuable lesson about leading a dive and NO DECO time limits.  Every day I learn something new and my confidence builds.

As it turned out the lockout ended up giving me an opportunity to learn a very valuable shop skill.  Filling and dealing with the tanks and the compressor.  When you have lemons...  I spent all day learning how to log, fill, and prepare the tanks that our shop produced throughout a very busy day.  And at around 3 o'clock my computer kicked back in and I was allowed to join the night dive at 6:00.

Night diving is a unique experience and requires a completely different skill set.  You only see what your flash light illuminates.  So it can be very claustrophobic and disorienting.  But it is also very exciting.  Many creatures only come out at night, like octopus, urchins, lobsters and many of the predator fish.  My job on this dive was to navigate us all back to the boat after my instructor lead us out for 40 minutes.  I failed but not miserably.  I got us heading in the right direction but not quite back to the boat.  I was not familiar with the dive site so I wasn't able to work from memory with the natural topography.  I was using the moonlight, shore lights glow and my compass.  Unfortunately there was a fairly decent cross current that pushed me off course.  At the end, my instructor took the lead over a wall to our right, and there was the boat. I was off by about 100 feet, but at night, that can be huge.

A highlight of the days across the island was finally a dive with my spear.  I killed 4 lionfish.  Here is my first kill.  We saved all the fish we killed that morning and gave them to our boat captain who lives on that side of the island.  By the time we returned from the second dive someone in his family had cooked them for him and delivered them back to the dock.  It doesn't get much fresher than that.

And the end of a very long day at the Reef Gliders shop. (My apologies for the blurry picture.  It was the camera not the tequila)

As the storm receded it left behind it cool weather and calm seas.  

And the last minute of a great day...