Bright Morning Light: Cozumel

Preparing to dive aboard the dive boat
to my right is Sandra - our dive master

Well, for those who are interested I am now a certified SCUBA diver. Woohoo! Anyways lets see... Tuesday was filled with more diving - the last of our certification dives. Taylor and I bummed around for the morning (of course) before heading to the dive dock for our 1:30pm dive. We had a two tank dive where we saw lots of exciting things (two tank means we went down with a tank then came back up for an hour then went down again with a second tank). We got to dive to an actual reef where the highlight was an Eagle ray and a bunch of fish and even a lobster - did you know they're not actually all bright red? This guy was blue and grey. Anyway... after those dives we were officially certified divers.

One of the dances on Wednesday night.

Wednesday dawned bright and early and of course after breakfast we lazed around (surprise!!). In the afternoon was a mass dive with all of the open water divers (before we had been split into morning and afternoon groups). This time we saw a SHARK!! It was cool! I spotted it first nestled under the coral. I got Taylor's attention and together we did our nut trying to get the attention of the rest of the group. Ever tried to get someone's attention without being able to yell? Yeah. It's hard. Anywho... so we saw the shark and more fish. On the second dive we saw a sea turtle! He was so cool! In the evening the hotel had a mexican night with mexican food and dancing. The dancing was pretty cool. They had a couple dances from each mexican state.

Bright colors dominated the little shops.

On Thursday, Taylor, William, Lisha, Alicia, and I ventured into town to see what we could see. We wandered through shops and down streets enjoying bartering and generally seeing what there was so see. After eating lunch we caught a taxi back to the hotel so that William would be on time for his shore dive. Taylor and I spent the afternoon holed up in our room before heading out for the night dive! What a different experience that was! It's rather hard to keep track of the coral when it pops up out of the darkness. I didn't hit any though so it worked out. We saw so much cool stuff on the night dive. I wished I had a camera but then again that would have been way to many things to keep track of underwater. We saw several Octopus - and even one that changed colors while we were watching it! We saw a squid type thing and lots of fish (surprise!). The dive master found a horseshoe crab and picked it up for all of us to touch. It was kinda rough and spiny. Twenty minutes into the dive the dive master had us turn off our lights and we got to play with the glow-in-the-dark stuff in the water. The more violently you flailed the more glowing stuff there was. Definitely a highlight.

Anyway, it's now Friday morning and Taylor and I are bumming around again. The plan is to spend the day doing homework :( - not nearly as exciting as diving.