Pics and Pains

Greetings dear readers,  I forgot to add in my last blog, Going Deep, that I had my camera with me also.  Although Carey takes better photos than I do, I still enjoy taking a few snaps if I can.  Here are the ones I took while at 129 feet.  We stopped next to a turtle to do our skills work and he stayed with us throughout.  Carey is the one in the cat ears.

 If you notice in the pic to the right Carey is upside down.  This is her standard photo op. position.  It puts her head and the camera right over the subject with out disturbing the surrounding area and allows her bubbles to go up, away from her camera and her eyes.

Just for the record, I haven't taken my spear out on a dive since the first day we got our licenses.  I do plan to use it when I finish the course at the end of the month.  I believe Haller J. still has the record for us novices at 6.  The rest of these photos are just me fooling around with my camera.  The Go Deeper dock houses a personal submarine that takes two extra people with the driver down to 1000 feet. I heard its dark & cold and a bit cramped.  To say the least.

These photos are of the Garbage bloom that I spoke about in an earlier blog.  Hard to believe this sign is on the beach here and is written in spanish.  Basically it says, " Please don't throw your garbage on our beach.  It's our heritage."

The pic below is the one our dive master took as we surfaced from a dive.  This is what we ascended into.  The pic below that is the huge garbage drift off of Utila, our sister island.

These past few days have seen little activity at the shop.  It is the slow month and its also raining quite a bit.  But idle hands...So the shop owner has us cleaning gear.  Yesterday we scrubbed and bleached all the BCDs and took apart all the masks and disinfected and cleaned them.  Today Francois and I did a confined water dive in the bay outside the shop, and finished our underwater equipment exchange then we all cleaned every regulator in the shop.  Many of the restaurants and a few of the dive shops have closed for the rest of the month.  This is the time of year that people are doing their annual cleaning and maintenance, or just taking some well deserved time off.  November is supposed to pick up again and then the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays should start to bring back the tourists.  Our boat does not go out without paying customers so if the DMTs need to do course work we wait for people to come in to dive and we and our instructors tag along.  Otherwise, like today, we have to do our book work or shallow water work. 

I have 2 more specialties to complete.  Night Diver and Search and Recovery Diver.  I also only have 5 or 6 skills and practical applications to complete to finish my Dive Master certification.  The most daunting will probably be done tomorrow.  I will lead certified divers on a typical dive.  Unfortunately all the divers are instructors, dive masters or other DMTs.  They will try their hardest to do everything wrong, to make "fatal" errors, and to reek havoc on me and the dive whenever possible.  My job is to watch out, fix, help, and complete the dive too.  The whole time I'm also supposed to be pointing out the cool stuff and also navigate us back to the boat after an hour of diving.