No words for it

Awesome. Amazing. Wonderful. Beautiful. Fabulous. Incredible.

Those are all good words. But they don't come close to capturing the feelings on our dive at the wall at La Parguera last Sunday. Our friends Darryl, John and Trevor and I headed out early and headed out for the southwest corner of the island on the Caribbean Sea side. (Here in the north we are on the Atlantic.) We had a date to go diving with Paradise Divers.

We were all geeked but I think me most of all. This was my first boat dive, my first wall dive, my first dive to 100 feet, and it was the certification dive for John, Trevor and me to become certified to use Nitrox, a different blend of breathing gas.

The good people at Paradise loaded our tanks and gear on the boat and we headed out into what passes for calm water in those parts. On the trip out to the dive site, the first thing we notice is the water color. The water in the Caribbean is a totally different color from the Atlantic side, that deep beautiful Caribbean blue. And clear. Crystal clear. We anchored in about 65 feet of water and the bottom was clearly visible. From the deck of the boat we could see fish swimming below us.

We anxious to get in the water so we quickly geared up and jumped in. As soon as we got in the water, even before we dropped to the bottom, it was obvious why this is one of the "must do" dives in Puerto Rico. Because the dive site is a mile or more off-shore and there are no rivers nearby dropping sediments, visibility is great, 100' or more pretty much all the time. There is also very little current, usually 1 knot or less. These combine to make a beautiful easy dive.

Not that the dive is without challenges. As we swam away from the boat, the bottom gently sloped down to about 75'. Then the bottom just dropped away plunging 150' or more. One of our goals for this dive was to reach between 100' and no more than 111' (The 111' mark is the bottom threshold of the Nitrox mix we were breathing.) In one of those quirks of instruments, according to my depth gauge, I was safely at 100'. According to the computer recording my dive, I hit 112', the absolute safe limit. But all is well.

We did a second dive to about 65' on another reef about half a mile away. So much life! There are seafan coral you can play hide-and-seek around. Absolutely amazing. For some reason that made sense to me at the time (but doesn't now) I didn't take my camera on the second dive. I'll quit kicking myself for that soon.

It was a great day. Thank you Darryl, John, Trevor and Paradise Divers. Not one of us can wait to go back.