Yesterday I went SCUBA diving down here on the NW coast of Columbia.
When I started this trip I had very limited but quit clear objectives as far as doing things went:
1) Make it to Panama
2) Do some rock climbing in Indian Creek, Utah
3) Do some SCUBA diving somewhere in Central America.
So, yesterdays efforts meant that I have now officially cleared that slate and everything else is "gravy" :)
As for the diving, it was not "spectacular" but it was good and I feel satisfied.
I did two dives with one of the local outfits and it cost me about $100. The first dive was the best because we went to two sunken wrecks and did a swim-through of a completely black and quite confined tunnel through one of the wrecks. This was quite scary and required some mental discipline to commit to it. There was also quite a lot of coral that I recognized from my home marine aquarium and the fish were also very colourful and recognizable. The visibility was so-so but it was good enough.
After that dive we hung out on a local beach with brilliant white sand and blue green Caribbean waters and had a nice lunch of fish and fruits prepared by the locals (included in the dive package).
The next dive was late to start and was shorter than desired since the dive leader was low on air. This had happened (more or less as expected) because one of the rented tanks and one of the regulators had problems (pretty normal for developing world dive equipment). I even mentioned that it would be nice if we had a spare reg' and tank for the dive when we were at the dock before leaving. I'm not surprised that the suggestion was ignored though since spare stuff just costs more money and they really do run on a shoestring down here. That said, I felt that the dive leader ran a very safe and well planned dive so no complaints there. The dive leaders limited air supply was compounded by the fact that everyone in the dive group was relatively experienced and calm when diving. That means that we did not puff rapidly through our air supply and so were quite efficient and the dive leader didn't get to end the dive early and thus conserve his own air for the next dive. So the end result was that the second dive was somewhat disappointing since it was short on time and had no exciting wrecks to play around - but it was still a nice dive anyway.
After we finished the dive we headed back to town in the launch. It took about 45 minutes for the trip out in the morning but it took about 70min for the way back. This was because the wind here in the afternoons is very strong and this causes waves and so I again found myself pounding through waves in a boat on the Caribbean. It was no real problem though since I had recent experience with much larger waves. We did get thoroughly soaked by the spray but the water is very warm (no need for a wet suit when diving) and I was wearing swimming gear anyway. Sorry there are no pictures of the actual diving but I don´t have the cash for a big dive camera and they didn´t rent any either. Oh well - memories are good enough :)
