Here and There

Well half of the Toronto Scuba Club is in Toronto today and just taught the pool portion of an open water course. The other half is on a pretty sweet little island, a small boating channel away from the island of Roatan (one of the Bay Islands in Honduras).

First of all, congratulations to our OW students, I know you did GREAT!! And well done to our refresfer students too....

Do I need to congratulate Peter on his teaching today? Of course not! We all know he taught a great course today.

One of the best things in Roatan is the diving. Another is the resort I am staying at :) It's a nice little exclusive thing with only 9 villas and a small lodge on the main island. The little villas are all on a small island reached by a private 24 hour 20 second ferry. So not a lot of disturbance on the villa island.

To make the diving even better, the dive shop here mostly caters to the resorts diving enthusiasts and only occasionally to outside guests. With a maximum capacity at the hotel of 28 guests and only a fraction of them diving, the dive shop professional to diver ratio is extraordinary. Not that I need too much attention, but its nice to have direct interaction with your dive crew. In fact, today, it was just me, the instructor and a DMT.

It is a little odd that they feel it necessary to lead fun divers with instructors, but apparently it is a house rule. Their maximum group size is also 6 divers per instructor. Not too hard when they also have five dive boats! All in all, a good little set-up.

So dive one today, to get a feel for these guys.

We did a nice wall dive that was supposed to be a drift dive, but there was little current, so not much drifting. Still, we got a fairly long distance even without the current and a good 55 mins from an 80 foot dive.

So-so flora....the usual corals and such and not a crazy amount of unusual fauna, but I had a fun dive anyway. Certainly enough to appease a cold and dive-desperate refugee from the cold north. I did get to spot a humongous crab (and point it out to the dive leader) and our dive was capped off by finding one of my favourite fish, a boxfish! Other than that we saw the usual Caribbean suspects.....parrotfish, spiny lobster, wrasse, damsels, butterfly fish, giant grouper, sergeant majors, snappers and tangs, etc.

A few of the snappers actually did something unusual and decided to accompany us for about two thirds of the dive....quite bizarre. The tangs were also very friendly, swimming about a nose-length away from my mask for a close-up look at yours truly (no smart alec remarks about that still being a long way off because of the size of my snout).

And this was my first wall-dive since BC last May, so refreshing once more to look into the abyss. I have a bit of a love-terror relationship with the abyss....part mesmerized and thrilled by the incredible depth and mystery of thousands of feet of drop-off and part terrified by the incredible depth and sheer intensity of the deep blue sea. Still, it was great to float around, spin about and revel in warmth of a toasty ocean dive.

It makes me think we REALLY need to start bringing groups south soon...it is simply so soul-satisfying and relaxing. Strangely enough though, the dive today got me completely pumped for our summer weekends planned for Brockville. YES! Wrecks!! My advanced students are going to have a fricking awesome time...

Two or three dives planned for tomorrow!