Days of Wonder

Warning: Reading the following might make you want to quit your day job, sell all your worldly possessions and move to a small Honduran island called Utila. Read at your own risk.

I realize that I have created a bit of a sticky situation for myself. Trying to write about the last 48 hours could well take the space of a small novel. On the other hand, each day I don’t write is filled with more stuff to explain and more stories to tell, so they have to come out somehow. My goal: to give you a general idea of what the last two days have looked like. I’ll of course throw in some specifics, and though some of it just won’t make it, of course, those will be stories I will tell upon my return (if that ever happens, let’s be real).

So where to start? My last two days have started the same way: I sleep in as much as I can (only about eight o’clock thanks to the damn heat) and then I walk to the office of the hostel I am staying in to fill up my water bottles. I usually feel hungover when I wake up, not (yet) because of booze, but because I quite literally cannot take in enough water to stay hydrated. Hangover free since ’93 might be over, without having consumed so much as a drop of alcohol. I then walk down the street to a bakery which makes the most delicious cinnamon rolls this world has ever seen. They aren’t too sweet, nor too big. Just. Right. I ordered one the yesterday, and three this morning. Tomorrow is likely to be three again. Or maybe four. It’s the hardest decision I will make all day. I then read for a couple of hours while trying to drown myself in liquids, as the temperature and humidity start to rise.

Usually at around eleven thirty I head to the dive shop, which is about a ten-minute walk away. The island has two streets (although there are a few branches) and the dive shop is on one while the Mango Inn is on the other. These streets are poorly poured concrete about as wide as a car and a half, maybe even smaller. Everybody rides mopeds or motorcycles or dirt bikes, with the occasional “yuk-yuk” or small, Asian style taxi thing. I’ll snap a photo one of these days to show you. Everyone hauls around these two wheeled instruments from hell, doing their best to get as close as possible to you without hitting you. It’s an adventure walking down the street, let me tell you.

The dive shop is a really busy place, always crowded with people doing their thing. To tell you the truth, it is intimidating as hell to walk in there the first two days. Everyone seems to know everyone, and they all know what they are doing, grabbing weights from here, checking a tank there, snagging a BC there. And when asked, they all seemed to have arrived last week. Until tonight, I didn’t know how everyone got so comfortable so quickly. But more on that later.

Once at the dive shop I mill around trying to look like I know what I am doing for a while. The day is broken into morning dives (leaving at 8 am), afternoon dives (leaving at 1 pm) and night dives (leaving at 6 pm). Once the boats (there are five) return from the morning dives, I usually help unload empty tanks and then reload full ones. Each time the boat goes out, they go out for two dives, and so you fill the boat with two tanks for each person. This generally means the boat has anywhere from twenty tanks to, oh, I’d say about thirty-six or so. Once the tanks are loaded, I snag all of my gear, cart it to the boat, and start setting up my rig. I was intimidated to do this the first time but have since realized that if I do it early enough, I can do it at my own speed and take the time I like to really have it set up correctly. After I am all set up, it is time to roast in the sun for an hour as we wait for the boat captain to arrive. I know I have mentioned it, but I really can’t stress how unbearably hot and humid it is here. I am going to keep stressing that until October and November rolls around so all ya’ll can be jealous. Just sitting in the shade of the boat today, I felt like I was taking a shower in my own sweat. I quite honestly look like I have been in the water when I haven’t been close, sweat dripping down me in a very, very sexy way. Needless to say, the women are flocking to me. Between the sweat and the smell of freshly applied sunscreen, I am damn near irresistible!

Eventually the captain of the boat arrives and we head off. The captains are local guys who are by and large, an absolute crack up! Today my captain was Cookie, the hands down favorite amongst everyone. He is a jolly black man who has the thickest Jamaican or Caribbean accent I have ever heard. And he loves his tunes. Today was “Paper Planes” by MIA. Other days it is Lady Gaga or some other pop dance tune. The man is a riot.

So far we haven’t strayed far from the dive shot in our dives, but there is really no need, as reefs lay not five minutes away. Yesterday we did “Airport Caves” and “Serge’s Bank”. This first dive, “Airport Caves” was absolutely stunning. We dropped down to about thirty or so feet (they use meters here which is really throwing me for a loop. Yeah, yeah, yeah, just multiple by three. But still!) and kicked through shallow channels in the coral. We followed the sandy bottom in a single file line (there were five of us including the Dive Master [DM]) until we reached the “caves”. It wasn’t like a huge cave or anything, but it was decent enough. Probably fifteen feet long, five feet tall, and five feet wide, it was just enough to fit one diver at a time, single file. Just enough to make Dallas pass out and wish he were getting cremated. We followed each other into the tube and once at the end, made a left into the inky darkness and followed the tube another twenty feet or so back out. What made it so incredible (other than the fact that I think I really like caves!) was the thousands upon thousands of fish schooling around us. I am not kidding when I say thousands. They were probably an inch or two long and not real big, but when there are thousands of them moving as one all around you, its pretty darn impressive. I could dive that cave every single day for the rest of my life and not get sick of how amazing it is. Stunning. We did it again at the end of our dive and it was even more amazing. I saw a trumpet fish just chilling in the cave with all of the smaller fish which was pretty darn cool.

The second dive I did yesterday was less than stellar. As I switched tanks and geared up, I realized my dive computer wasn’t working properly. For those who don’t know, a dive computer is used for several things. Primarily it is a way to tell how deep you are and how long you’ve been down. What I am doing is called “No Decompression Diving”. This means that whatever depth I go to, I can theoretically ascend straight to the surface if need be (although you never do). The alternative is that you would need to make “safety stops”, or pauses lasting several minutes (even hours) at various depths to off gas the nitrogen that has built up in your system. If you don’t do this properly, you will likely suffer from “the bends” which can be anything from soreness in the joints to paralysis and death. So pretty important stuff. My dive computer is a very advanced one and I absolutely love it. It tells me how long I can stay at a given depth before it becomes a “deco dive”, or one in which I will need to decompress. It is also set up so that it wirelessly transmits the amount of air I have left in my tank so that I don’t need a separate gauge for that. It will even calculate how much time I can spend underwater based on how much air is left (not a straight forward thing because as you go deeper, you use air at a quicker rate). The one problem is, the wireless can stop working and all of a sudden, you don’t know how much air is left in your tank. The two most important numbers you need to know are depth and remaining PSI (followed closely by time), and as I got ready for the second dive yesterday, my computer simply read “FAIL” for my PSI. Not very helpful. I turned it on and off, reset it, everything I could think of. Nothing worked. Luckily, I had heard that this could happen so I paid to have a small gauge installed that would just tell me PSI. In a way it defeats the purpose because it adds an extra gauge, but I felt it would be worth it. And it turns out it was! Instead of having to abort the dive, I simply relied on this gauge instead of my computer. It wasn’t the ideal situation I was used to but was perfectly safe and worked out just fine. Since I started out the dive a little flustered, it was a bit of a rocky dive. It is best to approach dives calmly and slowly, and for me, throwing this off a little bit can throw the whole dive off. But I survived it and in the grand scheme of things, it was a pretty spectacular dive.

Last night ended with a pig roast at one of the instructor’s houses. For only 100 lemps (Lempira, the currency of Honduras) or about five bucks, I got to eat a pig that had been roasted underground all day, as well as other delicious food. It was a lot of fun actually, although I was initially really uncomfortable. As everyone who has ever met me knows, I am not the “social” type. Newness is my weakness, I thrive on familiarity. So walking into a rather large party with an extremely eccentric Welsh girl that is sharing my hostel room was a bit unnerving. I ended up making several good friends though, one of which was Henrique, a Swedish guy who has been my dive buddy for the past two days.

Today was much the same, two dives in the afternoon followed by a party at night. Our first dive today we dropped down nice and deep (75 feet, my deepest dive yet) to a fishing boat that had sunk after a hurricane. It was unbelievably cool. Something about seeing a man made object underwater is just beyond thrilling. There were fish all around it and the sea was starting to reclaim the boat, corroding various parts of it. Another highlight of the dive was seeing Garden Eels. These are small eels, between 8 and 15 inches long, that dig holes in the sand and then peer up out of them, catching food that slides by in the currents. They are pretty cool because they are so small and yet we found a whole patch of them.

And finally, the moment you have been waiting for, pictures! I promised them and I deliver. The first thing to note is that I am missing a few that I wanted to include because I discovered that I forget the cable for my smaller point and shoot camera. I brought the cable for my bigger one thinking that it would work on both, only to find out that it will not. But I think I know someone who has the cable so those pictures will hopefully surface eventually!

I actually wish that damn fish wasn't in this photo!

Luckily though, I have some photos from our second dive, in which I took my nice camera underwater in its housing for the first time ever! Everything still works, so that is a huge bonus. We went to a popular dive site called “Moons Hole”. This is essentially a large circle of sand surrounded by coral. In the middle is a rusted bicycle. The story goes that there was a man on the island who always stole bikes, tons of them. One day, he somehow got his own bike, brought to the island from mainland Honduras. Everyone knew that he was the bike thief and they were sick of it, so they banded together to steal his bike and dropped it in the middle of Moons Hole. Cool story and even cooler bike! I think the Geoff could fix it right up, the man is a wizard with two wheeled vehicles.

Spot of lube and she'll be rolling along!

I don't love this photo but I wanted to show what was hiding in the bike seat.

This is how I am spending my time...

While I loved diving with a camera, I was surprised to realize that it detracted from the dive a bit. I wasn’t able to take in as much of the dive as normal, because I was focused on taking pictures rather than just admiring my surroundings. I also found that the little parts of diving that are really important, like buoyancy and air consumption, went to hell because I was so focused on getting the picture. That being said, it is awesome to have photos from the dive, and I am sure that you will enjoy them. I have tried to leave them as they were taken for the most part, although I have improved the color on some of them. As you descend in the water, you start to lose color. Red is the first color to go, followed by orange and other vibrant colors. Everything starts to look rather blue and green at a certain depth. This is why flashes are so important in underwater photography, because they add much of the missing color back. I was amazed to look at my camera screen at times and see colors in the coral that I didn’t even know were there, because I had no light source to help me see them.

So here is where I have to stop and apologize. I have written about three and a half pages, a fair amount by my standards. And yet, I feel as if I haven’t done my days justice, even my dives justice. Simply too much has happened to describe it all in the detail that I would like. I hope that in the coming posts I will be able to capture various parts better, and explain more, because I don’t like the long, rambling posts that don’t contain any detail. Mostly I just wanted to get semi caught up so that everyone knew what was going on.

Tomorrow I start my Advanced Open Water class. We will be making three dives tomorrow, followed by two dives Sunday morning. Tomorrow we are going to do a deep dive, to about 100 feet or so, followed by a navigation dive and finally a night dive. I am really excited to keep diving and start on my classes, they should be a lot of fun.

For now, I am feeling the call of bed. There are still a few things that I wish I could write about, but I don’t think that I would do any of it justice. I know these last two posts have been slightly off and have ended a bit abruptly, but I find myself fatiguing quickly and I know that sleep is important. Hopefully the posts to come will be more polished.

Regardless of all of that, I hope that you are enjoying it, as I am still very much enjoying writing it. I hope that this finds everyone well and enjoying their fall. If you need some heat, just let me know. I would be happy to bottle some sweat for you and ship it home!

Until next time,

Underwater Gingo, signing off.

I think you'll find I have an unhealthy obsession with bubbles