Scuba Diving Vacations

We had some huge surf yesterday and it's still up today so I cancelled the dive. It should settle down enough to go tomorrwo. I've yet to hear of any predictions for the next swell, so it hopefully will be business as usual for a bit. Today will be spent cleaning the vacation rental as we have guests coming in tonight.

Well, I blew it bigtime the other day. I woke up with sore sinuses so I figured my other crew member would do the dives. When I put the camera in the housing I noticed a bit of lint on the o-ring. Rather than take the time to clean it up and re-house the camera I decided to leave the camera home.

Man- O -Man, am I regretting that now. We had a 35 foot whaleshark offshore for over an hour. Boats were coming an going for at least that long. We spent probably 20 or so minutes on it. It was quite inquisitive, going from boat to boat and checking things out. After my other crew got his fill, I donned my gear and went down to about 15' depth for 5 or 6 minutes to watch. At one point the shark turned and came right to me head on, I had to lean back to keep from getting bumped. Pretty cool seeing a 3-4' wide mouth 3 inches from your face. It wasn't open so I didn't get a look inside to see if it resembles a manta's mouth. It's interesting that an animal so large has eyeballs roughly the size of a quarter.

Well, hopefully there will be other opportunities in the coming weeks. I've heard of 4-5 sightings in the last 3 weeks or so, but none where so many boats got to spend so much time with the sharks.

Here's a helmet snail. They feed on collector urchins. When we find one of these snails we can offer them an urchin. Sometimes they go for it.

Happy diving!

Steve