A great day diving

This is kind of the reverse of the "119' dive" day.

We started yesterday drifting from Natural to Wishing Well. We've been doing this all summer but we really haven't had the current we expected to push us along. Today we caught a good ride. It's about 3/4 mile from Natural to Wishing Well. Without really trying we made it with air to spare.

The reef at Natural has an interesting profile. The reef slopes away from the shore. But it also slopes down from the southern end at Playa India (the beach where we enter) to about 65 feet. As it continues north, it rises again to 20-25 feet. So the deepest point is about a third of the way through the dive and the last third is quite shallow. That means air consumption at the end of the dive is minimal.

Darryl and I were under water for 73 minutes, came out right at the beach at Wishing Well and still had air left.

We decided to do a night dive at Crashboat last night. Again, Crashboat is a very shallow dive; the maximum depth under the piers is about 30 feet or so. (Farther out it gets deeper; this also where we did the 119 foot dive.) The current was neutral so we took it easy swimming around under the piers.

We played with reef squid for a while.

Sixty minutes into the dive we'd used less than half our air. I finally started to get chilly and signaled Darryl to head for shore. On the way in we stopped to play with a couple of starfish. When we got to shore, I checked my dive computer: 78 minutes! And I still had nearly 1200 psi (out of 3000 at the beginning of the dive).

Two dives. A total of 151 minutes underwater. Shallow dives are amazing! A friend asked me if I'm trying to reverse evolution. Sometimes slithering back into the ocean doesn't sound like such a bad idea.