Thursday, July 5, 2012
We had made plans last night to get up and leave a little after 8 a.m. this morning to go to the dive shop (they open at 8 a.m.) and get tanks for our first two dives of the day. Then we were going to stop and get breakfast at El Mundo on the way through town since we were heading up north to do our two dives, one at 1000 Steps and the other at Karpata.
I think we got out of the hotel about 8:30 or so -- it is hard to get us all moving when we have adjusted to island time. Then we stopped downtown at El Mundo and had breakfast. Tim had a Dutch pancake with apple and the rest of us had American style pancakes. After stuffing ourselves, we headed on down the road to our first dive site, 1000 Steps.
This dive site has a bunch of steps to get down the side of the cliff to the dive site (like 60-70, just feels like 1000). Tim was nice enough to carry my stuff down and up for me since I did not want to aggravate my back. It is great having Tim along--he is our little pack mule. He has way too much energy!!! Jody managed to carry all her own gear down and back up--what a trooper. Of course we had to listen to her whine about any other steps we had to do the rest of the day...
We had a nice dive here. I got some really good footage of a giant lobster that decided to come out and wander all around the reef trying to find a new den--or at least that is what I assume it was doing. I have never seen a lobster do that ever before. Usually once they are spotted they back into their den and you don’t see much of them. We had a lot of things that were out of the ordinary today, though.
After we hiked back up the hill and loaded the car we headed down the road a little ways to our next dive site, Karpata. By the time we got there we still had about 30 minutes left on our surface interval so we watched some other people getting in the water to see how they did it. This entry was a little more challenging and there were some pretty good waves coming in.
As we were getting our gear ready there were a bunch of Iguana’s congregating around us. I think people must feed them at this dive site and they must have thought Tim had some food. Tim was not paying attention and two of them started running toward him and when he looked up they scared the crap out of him. I don’t know who was more surprised, Tim or the iguanas.
After our laugh at Tim’s expense we all headed down to the water to get in. It was a little challenging with the waves that were coming in, but we managed to get in with not too much trouble. Right after we got in we saw a big school of blue tang and a really big parrotfish swimming along with them. We saw a couple more lobsters, but nothing overly exciting until the end of the dive. At the end of the dive I was trying to get some more footage of the giant parrotfish when Tim used his noise maker to get my attention. I thought to myself this had better be good. I looked toward him and he pointed to an octopus that was out of its hole swimming around.
I swam over to it faster than you can believe. I got quite a bit of footage of this octopus. He was swimming, changing color and too busy hunting to worry about me taking video of him. It was amazing.
That was definitely the highlight of today’s dives and probably the trip. After we managed to get out -- some of us not as gracefully as others, we hiked back up the hill and loaded the car to head back to the hotel to have some lunch. We had left over pizza so that made lunch very fast and easy. As soon as we had some pizza we loaded up the car again to head down the road just a short bit to do our third dive at Bachelor’s Beach.
This is a nice sandy entry here so it make it a little easier to get in. We swam out a ways and took a group picture and then continued on with our dive. We saw a scorpionfish, at least two octopus, a very photogenic angelfish, a tiny and I mean tiny goby, and a couple snake eels out hunting.
Eric and Tim decided they were going to do a night dive too, so we came back to the hotel and they had a little snack before they headed down to the hotel pier to do a night dive. Jody and I decided we were tired and stayed behind in the room. The guys said their night dive was really cool. They said they turned off their lights a couple times and it was the best light show they had ever seen before--the bioluminescence. After the guys got done with their night dive they were pretty hungry so they came back to the room and we all had some more left over pizza before we headed off to bed after a tiring but fun day.
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