The diving pace really picked up last Tuesday. We did three dives on Sunday, our first full day in Roatan, and three dives on Monday. But on Tuesday there was also a night dive.
Night dive days go like this: you do two dives in the morning, around 8 and 10:30 a.m., come in for lunch and then take a slightly shorter, slightly more shallow dive in the afternoon, at about 2:30 p.m. That evening, at about 6:30, you get back on the boat. As dusk falls across the ocean, you jump into the water.
I suppose you could do fewer dives. Some people do, but unless you aren’t feeling well this makes no sense to me. You’ve come to a dive resort for a reason.
For the first few minutes of a night dive you can still see pretty well simply by the ambient light in the sky. But before long you must turn on your flashlight. You turn on your flashlight because, without it, you’re in a perfect darkness. Now you can only see what is in your beam, and what is going on in the beams of the people diving off your boat. We had eight people in the water for the evening dive, so there was plenty of see-and-be-seen. This was The Yankee’s first night dive and my second or third, I think.
You see a few other creatures, more lobsters and an octopus or two if you’re lucky. You see some shrimp. You see fish that are sleeping. I like to run my flashlight along the tops of the reefs, though. It reminds me of being at home in the woods, somehow, in some gothic part of the South.
I describe it a bit because I can offer you no footage. A camera in a night dive just seemed like one handful too many. But, there’s some nice stuff we captured on our first three dives of the day. First, a few video highlights:
And here are some photos The Yankee took over the course of the day’s dive.
I must peer into every vase coral I see, for some reason. This one was on our first, and deepest dive of the day and it was just within range of the dive:
Here we all are enjoying some of the beautiful reefs that Roatan offers:
Look! I’m on the Internet! Twice for some reason!
Did you see the conch shell?
The other guy in the photograph is a man named Tom. He runs a dive shop in Orlando and on his vacation he decided to go diving. I figured he’d have preferred to go snow skiing or something. I don’t go to another university and pop my head in to see what they’re doing on their campus on all of my off days, after all. Tom said he never gets to just dive anymore. He’s always teaching. And you’ve never met a person more enthusiastic about the water. It was great to dive with him and his wife all week.
I also enjoy a good fan coral from time to time. In the center of this photo you see a nice little Gorgonian, the standard of the region:
They offer you some of the most brilliantly blue water in the western Caribbean. The visibility is marvelous and the waters are nice and warm and calm.
How could you not enjoy looking up into a view like that?
