Fiesta Americana Shore
Fiesta Americana ShoreOur plan was to kick northward against the current a bit and then work our way south to the pier with the current. The current was pretty stiff. We could kick against it, but decided that we didn't want to make too much headway against it, and instead just kicked enought to stall or slow down our drift. It would have been a fun current if we could have just ridden it and had someone pick us up down at Chankanaub.
It was shallower than we expected, not reaching 15 ft on the dive. Mostly sandy bottom with some small coral heads. There was quite a bit of small life on the corals, with more anemone than I expected.
We dropped onto the sand and gave Pirata a chance to look at our bouyancy. Then we headed over to the coral to a swim through to take us to the larger coral heads that lead to the wall. As we were spacing ourselves out for the swim through, a turtle came up and swam away from us. And on the exit, there was another turtle in the distance swiming along the wall.
This was a pretty dive, but I wasn't really getting into the rythym. On the safety stop Deanne came up a little light and we had to hold her down. I didn't have quite enough weight to do it easily -- I had thought I was enough overweighted that I could give away one of the ankle weights I put on my stem, but I guess that wasn't true.
Torementos was a very relaxed dive, hardly any of the current that one normally expects. Pirata showed that he had an extremely quick eye finding lots of macro opportunities for Deanne. Little fish coming up out of sand tubes, flounder the size of a dime. While Deanne wsa shooting a banded shrimp I watched some blennies outside a hole that had thin fibers of some sort of angler coming out. As I watched, suddenly all the fibers and the smallest blenny were gone. I guess learning to avoid those things are how one gets to be a larger blenny.
Deanne had added two pounds of weight so we didn't have any safety stop problems.
We dropped onto the sand and watched a school of big-eyed jacks swim by as we drifted to the first of the large coral heads that are Columbia's signature. Columbia is just magificent on a grand scale. The building sized coral head impress from a distance, then as you close and the crevaces and swim throughs sweep you in, it impresses again with the intricate corals.
Life was everywhere and they just watched us flow by. There were spotted filefish in their orange phase everywhere. The scrawled cowfish just eyed us as we went by. I think I saw a queen trigger, but it was going one way I was zooming the other so I didn't get a good look.
Playing back the profile in the Suunto dive manager software confuses me. This was a dive that we were being particularly cautious with. I felt like I was watching my computer like a hawk and making sure I stayed 10 minutes out of decomp (EAN 37, P2 setting). Playing it back shows I got to 3 minutes out just before the ascent. I'm not sure what to believe.
Our boat was the Dive House I, a fairly well equiped twin screw diesel with a tower, swim deck, and a head. Francisco was the dive master with Piratas' help, and there was a captain and a deck hand. They divided us into two dive groups, one of 8 divers and one of 7 divers and dropped us about 100 yards apart. This worked pretty well and the two groups only occasionally saw each other.
Palancar Bricks
The surface interval was spent on the boat, with the crew being very helpful, often having your tank swapped before you got fully on the boat. There was plenty of bottled water, soft drinks (gotta love that orange Crystal!) and trays of bananas, pineapple and watermelon.
Tormentos
Once again we were on the Dive House I. Pretty much the same crew but with Marcos substituting for Pirata.
Columbia
Dalilia was a blast. The current was pretty strong and Marcos decided to just let us ride, knowing if he tried to stop us to look at small stuff it would just become a fight to keep the group together. So ride we did.
Delilah