Today Elaine and I did our second "solo duo" dive, this time at Wishing Well. We've snorkeled this beautiful reef many times. It's a great snorkel. As soon as you enter the water, you are on the reef. There is lots of life, fish, eels, and many soft corals. And it's not deep.
We've talked for a long time about diving at Wishing Well. There is so much to see there and as beautiful as snorkeling is, you're still an outsider peering in. On SCUBA, you can be part of that world, at least for a little while. You can just hang there and watch the fish. If you swim calmly and quietly, you can sometimes approach much closer to the fish. You can peer under ledges that weren't even apparent from the surface.
On this dive our deepest depth was 21 feet. There is a lot to be said for shallow water diving. For one thing, your air lasts much longer. I'm an "air hog" and even I was down for 45 minutes and only used half of my available air. (For those who aren't aware, because of the laws of physics, one uses more air in less time when you dive deeper. For example, diving to about 65 feet, 45 minutes is about the best I've done using more than twice as much air as I did at Wishing Well.)
The light and the colors are brighter when you are shallow. Water absorbs light and color the deeper you, starting with the red end of the spectrum. On shallower dives the colors are more "natural."
For Elaine the two long shallow dives have been an easy comfortable way to get back into diving. For various reasons (mostly injuries) she has not bee diving for almost a year. These two dives helped her get comfortable under water in (relatively) safe, low stress, (pun intended) low pressure environment.
By the way - that's a lionfish we saw at Wishing Well. Lionfish are a very agressive invasive species that have found their way into most parts of the Caribbean. According to NOAA's National Ocean Service, lionfish have been in the Atlantic for at least 25 years. We're seeing more and more of them around here.
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