The Local Experience

I am all in favour of investigating the Local Experience when living in a place different from your own culture. That doesn't mean finding yourself in a Turkish prison just because you are in Turkey, but when I visit a culture that has cuisines notably different than "home" I want to try all kinds of new foods.

There is something to be said about a local place that is patronized by locals. In my family we used to say that if you go to an ethnic restaurant and it is filled with people of that ethnicity, it MUST be a good place. Well, here in Cozumel there is a place in the central Plaza called Raspados. The Plaza is very popular during the day for tourists and Raspados makes a killing selling ice cream (three words: Location, Location, Location.)

But on Sunday nights the cruise ships are gone and the locals all come out for a night of fresh air, music, and... apparently... whatever Raspados sells. For four years I've watched as a l-o-n-g line of people, 98% locals, would wait patiently at Raspados. I always thought it was for ice cream. But last week I discovered it was for something entirely different: styrofoam cups full of boiled corn! In the local tongue it is called "esquites" and it originates from central Mexico.

Tonight, I decided this was a "must do, must try" local experience. There were 40 people in front of me in line. As I slowly crept forward, the line never got shorter... more people always queued up. By the time I got to the front, 35 minutes had passed. These were some of the most patient people I'd ever stood in a queue with. (Pardon the bad grammar.) Anticipation built with every step -- as did the wonderful aroma of the fresh corn.

I can tell you the ingredients that went into this cup (in this order): corn, mayonnaise, sour cream, salt, picante seasoning, lime juice. I can tell you the cost: 14 pesos (roughly US $1.28) But I cannot describe for you the rainbow of flavours that danced on my tongue with the first bite! Somehow the sour cream and lime juice just WORKED together to make this incredible flavour that enhanced the corn in such an amazing way.

Esquites at Raspados: two thumbs up, and now on Alex's List of "Things You Must Do When You Visit Cozumel"

Dirty Lens and other Lessons Learned

One of the best ways to learn new things is to watch other people. During the cave tour week I was in the company of six other highly experienced scuba divers, five of which were open water Instructors! That's a humbling experience. But the one lesson I wish I'd learned was: Ear Drops. Some of the divers were religiously flushing their ears immediately after each cenote dive. Admittedly, the water in some cenotes doesn't look too good, but I'd never gotten an ear infection from cave diving before.... until now.

On Wednesday, a good five days after my last cave dive, I came down with a really BAD ear infection, the kind that is so painful you can't sleep at night. Fortunately some scuba friends recommended "Oto Eni" a strong antibiotic solution that would be prescription (and very expensive) in the U.S. It worked like a charm and four days later I am almost 100%. Even did three dives yesterday in salt water with no problem ear clearing and no pain. Lesson Learned: use ear drops after fresh water dives. And be careful of Cenote Calimba!! I am pretty sure that's where the bad water is.

Dirty Video Lenses

For two months now I've been using a Light & Motion Stingray II underwater video system both in the ocean and in caves. The system used to belong to John Mildenberg, friend of Andrew whom I'd mentioned before. John passed away last summer and his wife Maya, who came down last October with Andrew to Cozumel, sold me the kit. It's been a lot of fun to learn a new form of photography and to have a new "toy" to play with underwater.

The results have been pretty good, although I know that I am only beginning this learning curve towards "movie quality" composition. For now, it is a great way to document the places I'd been in caves and to capture moments in open water like "let's see how close I can get to this shark" and "what's that octopus eating?" and "look at this beautiful drum fish swimming out in the open at nighttime." The idea behind video is to tell a story in so many minutes but so far I am missing the script. Along the way I'm getting a lot of nice scenes though!

On yesterday's first dive we went to Palancar Bricks. Vis was less than average, maybe 60-80 feet. The view through the camera lens was even worse!! It looked like 10-12 feet. Ever since I'd gotten the video it seemed like something was not right with the optics but I'd put it off to lens flare. When I got home, I took a good hard look at my optics to discover that the flat port on the housing was filthy. You know how windows made of two sheets of thin glass will get foggy on the inside? That's exactly how this looked. Question was, how to open the flat port?

Manufacturers of dive gear are a strange bunch. They have EXCELLENT marketing staff and SUCKY technical writers. It's not just one brand, it is ALL of them. They write their manuals as if their only customers were 10 years old. They have no belief that any of us could be mechanically inclined enough to perform our own service work. I'd read the entire Light & Motion booklet and was disappointed many times over that there were lots of questions left unanswered. What to do with the flat port was yet another to add to the list. I got frustrated. I got angry. I got creative. I poked and prodded the inside O-rings with sharp objects in ways people say you shouldn't... and I persevered! Now my optics are crystal clear for the first time ever, and I'm seeing the world in a different way! What I thought was lens flare was in fact all the filth inside my optics.

Lesson learned: Don't assume equipment is 100% just because it works. Learn about it and understand it like a techie; don't be afraid to poke around.

Suunto Cobra Resets

Scuba diving is FUN. Diving to 130 feet doesn't scare me. Seeing sharks twice my size makes me want to get closer to investigate, not run away. Going 3,000 feet into a cave where there is only one exit (3,000 feet behind me) doesn't make me worried, it only makes me want to see what's beyond the next bend. Having my dive computer reset on me... that's a PROBLEM that doesn't get ignored.

On Tuesday, my Suunto Cobra (which I got of eBay and I've used for six years and three batteries) ran flawlessly on the morning dive. Just before the 2nd dive I'm setting up the Nitrox and as soon as I do, it resets!! No nitrox, no time-of-day, no memory of the last dive, nothing. So I set Nitrox again. It resets AGAIN. Scary. On the 3rd go, it sticks and I decide to dive anyway, not having an alternative like my spare computer. The manufacturer(s) and dive organizations say when you get erratic computer behaviour, you should cancel your dive.

Those of you who know me know I'm not big on taking unwarranted risks. On this dive we were going to be 50 ft maximum (40 ft average) and I had a 36% Nitrox tank. Even at worst case that gave me over an hour of bottom time. Without a computer, there's no real risk on this profile. What should I worried about? If the dive computer is failing because it was flooding (I'd replaced the HP hose seal the day before) then diving with it again would only make it worse.

Off we went. It worked great for almost the entire dive, and then coming out of the water right at the end, it resets while I'm checking the bottom time and temperature. Weird!! Back at home, I start surfing the internet for probable causes. Google: "suunto cobra resetting" and some interesting results pop up. Turns out that Lithium coin cell batteries are not always consistent and although you can have a "good" battery indicator on the computer, it may be at the end of its service life. This battery I'd been using for about two years (150 dives?) never registered the full 4 bars on battery test - it always registered three. I guess that was a warning sign in and of itself. But... 150 dives? I never worried about it. However some posts were saying the battery should be replaced after 100 dives or two years... oops.

That night I replaced the battery with a fresh new Energizer CR2450. The old battery was a mystery brand I picked up at a local camera store on Cozumel. Now I'm reading 4 bars again and the computer has worked perfectly for yesterday's three dives. I hope anyone who has come across this website because of a similar problem will take heart: If your dive computer is resetting and the battery is a year old or older, try replacing it with a name-brand battery. But do so only if you feel competent to keep all the seals clean.

Lesson Learned: Use only name-brand batteries. Change it after 200 dives, 200 hours or 2 years.

DiveRite H10 HID canister light

Dive Rite has been around a while and they make a wide range of products specially for the technical diving market. It is no surprise that among cave divers, you see their stuff all over the place. Most specifically I use their Transpac harness, Rec Wing bladder and H10 canister light.

On this particular dive trip (80 days in Cozumel, 8 days in Akumal) I've had more equipment problems than I care to remember. But the most annoying has been the H10 canister light. As you can guess the light is the heart of a cave diver's arsenal and although we carry backups, these powerful HID lights are extremely important towards our enjoyment of cave diving. When they quit working, we have a bad day.

I purchased my H10 about 2-1/2 years ago. It has been with me over 100 dives though probably closer to 150. Dive Rite makes good products but I feel they don't always use the best materials; case in point is this light. I have what is apparently known as the "infamous orange cord" a water-proof 2 wire cable that links the battery to the light head. In incidents barely a week apart, the wires BROKE inside the plastic in two places: near the canister and near the light head. Fixing this in the field involved extremely delicate surgery with a lot of tools and several hours' labour. I am enormously thankful I brought those tools with me, one of which was a soldering iron! The cable is now six inches shorter and it will be sent back to Dive Rite to be replaced at the end of this trip. Considering that this cord is notorious to fail, and that a cave diver's light is considered SAFETY equipment, I am both surprised and annoyed that Dive Rite did not post a recall or even an advisory on this issue.

Lesson Learned: If you own any Dive Rite canister light with an orange cord, GET IT REPLACED. NOW.

Nohoch nah Chich - The Giant Birdcage

Here I am .... last day and I survived, much to the relief of my family and at least one of my web clients who knew I was going on this trip.

Nohoch nah Chich as it is known in Mayan means "giant birdcage" which I am guessing is because many of the cascading rooms of floor-to-ceiling stalactites give the diver a feeling of being inside a giant birdcage. My last trip was with Glenn and we did a different side passage but not as far a penetration. The most bizzare stuff I'd ever seen in a cave was there, and of course my camera strobes quit after four pictures so I have nothing to show. Well, we didn't go down that same passage today so I still have nothing to show. I've vowed to go out again with Glenn in a few weeks and dive it until we find it.

But today we did go a very fun circuit for a 114 minute dive, up one side passage past a tiny cenote (large enough for two divers) and then further along to an air bell where we made the turn at 60 minutes (it was either turned at 3rds or 60 minutes this time). Maybe a penetration of about 2,500 feet with 4,000+ feet covered overall. Max depth was a screaming impressive 23 feet, and I think average depth was all of about 12 feet. This cave system is none too deep!

Cave diver's joke:
Q: Why do cave divers carry snorkels?
A: To slurp up that extra air stuck to the cave ceiling.
(technical note: cave divers do NOT carry snorkels! I don't think I've even carried a snorkel for an open water dive unless it was required for a PADI class.)

I took the video camera this time, figuring this may be the only time I will take video in this cave. Unfortunately two of the best shots I lined up to do I had brain farts and apparently had the camera in "standby" mode instead of record mode. I am too tired to review the tape just now but I know the first half of the dive should come out pretty nice. A lot of formations show very well when presented in 3-d motion, I think it is the only way to truly show their depth and shape.

However, I feel this cave looks better in still photography as many of the formations and rooms are so big that video perspective just gets lost. The main passage was so big that even with my powerful 10w HID set to the tightest spotlight, I still couldn't see the far wall. Visibility was a factor, though; it was a bit lower here than in other caves, even though it was entirely fresh water. Next time I will take the DSLR, armed with two big honkin' Ikelite 400's. I'll need 'em!!

Tomorrow it is home (or temporary home) back to Cozumel. I'm looking forward to diving in open water again, even though I will have to do only night dives for a while until my eyes readjust to the light.

Truthfully, as I look back on the past week, I have to say I love cave diving even more than I did before the trip. The tours have provided me with some new challenges, including the problems associated with diving with large groups. And diving with one person I don't particularly like. I am extremely thankful that all of our dives were uneventful -- no panics, no equipment problems, no lost or misplaced folks, minimal confusion with communications and no broken gear. Just fond memories of some great caves.

Will I do it again next year? Maybe.....

Calimba to Bosh Chen

Just a short entry today because tomorrow is the last dive, a long one in the wonderful world of Nohoch Nah Chih. But I'm getting ahead of the story....

Today our group of six (lost the seventh to exhaustion, I think) visited Calimba (or Kalimba) for two dives. I took the video camera on the first dive after assurances that there would be enough room to maneuver. The selling point was being told by Connie "you'll regret not bringing it." She was right.

For the first dive we took the mainline towards the Paso de Lagarto line until we reached it. Then two quick jumps (one of which was a snap-and-gap) and off we went towards cenote Bosh Chen. Boy! Some of those passages were tight. Considering I was pushing the video camera the whole way I think I did really well with the restrictions. We reached the 4th jump but then confusion ensued: Connie was trying to establish with the rest of the team whether or not anyone had reached 3rds; one diver tried to state "turn around" as a question and that got interpreted as "yes, it's time to turn around" so turn around we did. I still had 350 psi before my turn-around, I could easily have made it to Bosh Chen.... but there's always next time. We did miss some of the larger and more decorated rooms which were just ahead.

The second dive was after lunch, and this time it was a right turn on the Lagarto line, with no further jumps afterwards. I didn't take the video this time. Yow! Right after the jump onto Lagarto we were doing sandwiches, vertical ascents and descents, really tight squeezes through delicate stalactites. Remember me metioning a rhino in a china shop? Ditto for today! Dive was turned (predictably) at about 40 minutes, for a total dive time of around 82 minutes.

Talk about tight... This cave emphasizes the "O" in Overhead Environment.

Wait until you see the video!!!

Labna Ha

If I have my story right (and mind you, I may not be 100% accurate) a small group of entrepreneurial foreigners bought 124 acres of scrub land in the middle of the Riviera Maya... with the purpose of discovering, exploring and exploiting for tourist trade the caves known to be in the region.

One of many discoveries was the underwater cave system now known as Labna Ha. It is very exclusive; you can only dive there with an owner or a highly trusted representative. There is no underwater photography permitted. Photography above water is permitted but only without a tripod. And I've heard that you may be charged as much as US$150 for one cave dive. The owners now boast that the property was recently appraised at $7 million. With the growing popularity of cave diving and other forms of tourism in this region, I think they were very smart to do what they did.

Today we split into two groups of four; those who'd been to Labna Ha previously went with Pep, one of the owners, to visit side passages off the main line. I was in the group led by Connie as we would do a long penetration along the main line only. We made it 62 minutes into the dive (approximately 3000' or so) before one of the team called on thirds. I was still about twenty minutes from calling thirds myself but that's okay. We ended with 120 minutes total dive time according to my watch -- that's a LONG dive.

Labna Ha is not a big cave in terms of cross-sectional area and there are many tight restrictions where I felt like a rhinoceros trying to walk gingerly through a china shop. I will proudly say that I hardly touched a thing; without a camera I could dedicate all my awareness to maintaining perfect trim. Unfortunately I witnessed periodic damage being done by others on the team (I'm sure I wasn't 100% perfect either) as fins brushed against those delicate formations. Oh well. I have always accepted that it was one of the sad truths about this sport. You cannot make a cave better by diving in it, only worse.

After the dive we were treated to a lunch of barbecue chicken and chorizo, Mayan style. Afterwards we shot down a zip line to a dry cave to tour there. The owners lit it very nicely with coloured lights. Even though we were not allowed tripods, I would set the camera down on the wood walkway to get the 2-3 second exposures needed in that amount of light. The results were spectacular. The photo above is one of the best; be sure to click on it to see it in full size. I uploaded the original JPEG for you to enjoy.

Labna Ha was talked up all week as one of the best caves to visit. Although I saw some really awesome formations, it would not be my #1 choice for a return dive. Not really disappointed, just not as impressed as the hype led me to believe. IMHO it isn't even as fun as Sac Aktun. And in Sac Aktun we're allowed all the photography we can manage!

Mastodon Bones

Welcome back to my journey through the Riviera Maya cave systems. Today was a l-o-n-g trip to Cenote Tux (or Tush) Kubaxa (pronounced toosh ku-boh-sha). Getting to the site was the biggest challenge as the entrance was about three painful, rocky, jarring, untamed miles through the jungle. We were fortunate, actually, as the road didn't exist until recently and the only way previous to this "road" was by horseback. Nonetheless, my back is still very sore from the trip. I'm badly in need of a chiropractor to un-jam what was jammed and I'm concerned how this may affect the rest of the trip.

But being underwater in scuba gear is a near-weightless experience and lets me forget that I have to take the same road to get back out... at least for the 90 minutes of the dive.

I have to step back a moment and describe the group. Connie LoRe is the organizer and host; she does these week-long tours several times a year mostly in wintertime. Her normal job is a manager of the well known cave dive site Ginnie Springs in central Florida. There are two couples, one from Ohio and the other from New York, I think. I'm here by myself and so is Sandra, my cave partner for the week, shown in the picture above. She's almost two decades older than I am and probably in much better shape than me. For this dive I loaned her my video system while I took my DSLR for the first time this trip. This is also the first dive I took my recently acquired Ikelite 400 strobe into a cave.

Now I need to step back yet again, this time to talk about strobes. Two years ago I was shooting with a Canon S1 IS using its built-in strobe. In darkness it had an effective lighting distance of about two feet... but in daylight the camera itself did a wonderful job. We still have it and sometimes use it. Last year, Andrew gave me his old DSLR set-up on long-term loan which I am still using. The strobes on this system are Sea&Sea YS-90's with an output power of about 67 watt-seconds. Most underwater strobes are in the power range of about 50-100 watt-seconds. The biggest ones currently made are roughly 150 watt-seconds and they're pretty big size-wise. But the king of commercially made underwater strobes is (or at least was... they're no longer manufactured) the Ikelite 400 which can put out an amazing 400 watt-seconds of power in one burst. In a cave where there is absolutely no natural light, you need this kind of power to get any sense of depth. Last year when I used two YS-90's the result was... nice... but wanting. Today, using one YS-90 on the left and one Ikelite 400 on the right, I got really GOOD results. Leaning towards the kind of results I have been looking for in underwater cave photography. I still need to fine tune my camera settings, fix my dome port (I scratched the inside of it last month trying a mutant lens set-up) and connect the sync cord directly to the strobe instead of trying to use slave mode. The reason for the latter is very technical and I'll skip it for now.

And of course, why have one Ikelite 400 when you could use two! Yes, I have two of them but they weigh so much (8 lbs each) that I haven't bothered to set up the camera rig with both at the same time. But *sigh* I am dreaming of the thought of 800 screaming watts for wide angle cave photography. Maybe the end of this week. We'll see.

Carrying a camera (still or video) with you on a dive is troublesome. It throws off your balance, it causes a LOT of drag, it adds a heavy amount of task loading (non-tech diver folks can simply read that as "stress") and in a cave environment it is a bulky part of your profile that you have to push... ever so gently, for the sake of the cave and the camera... through every tight passage you will face in the cave. I always burn a lot more air when I have a camera; there's no way to relax on a dive when carrying one. But when everything works: when the camera doesn't leak, when the batteries are all charged, when the camera itself doesn't keep resetting on me (another story for another day), and all the settings like aperture, shutter speed, ISO, sync rate, strobe angle, angle of reflection, subject distance.... you get the idea.... When all of that is working, the photos are wonderful memories of where I've been.

So. Today. We went to Tux Kubaxa to see mastodon bones. If you look in the picture above just behind the video camera you'll see the biggest bone of the lot. The picture at right is the best close-up I got. To get to this spot we swam for about 40 minutes, then spent three minutes crowding around getting in each others' way... three of us taking photos and video. I had a bad moment not being able to back up and though I wasn't near any panic, I was thoroughly annoyed that my delicate buoyancy control was out of whack. (My cave partner has it on video, it's most embarrasing.) Too many divers in too tight a spot, so says I. But we all survived, I got good pictures of the bones, Sandra has nice video especially on the way out as she was gradually mastering the nuances of the video housing.

Connie calls Tux Kubaxa a "Power Cave" with emphasis on the capital letters. It is big, it has lots of huge rooms that remind me of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Except these are filled with water of course. It has gorgeous white limestone formations all over the place. What else can I tell you? It was impressive.

Cave Diving with Connie

About two months ago I was actively looking for new venues to do cave diving, particularly in the Riviera Maya region of Mexico. I was flipping through the recent issue of Underwater Speleology (the rag put out by the NSS-CDS) and came across an ad for a week-long cave "camp" hosted by Connie LoRe, a well known personality in the cave community. Sounded perfect to me, so after a few quick correspondences I plopped down a hefty deposit and waited patiently for the trip to start.

The base of operations is at Villas deRosa in Aventuras Akumal. Aside from some staffing problems having to do with the cooks, the operation at Villas deRosa runs pretty smoothely. Connie's group is six divers, three women three men and (as I'm getting used to in this business) I am the youngest. There is another larger group here from Alabama, a combination of open water and cave divers. This hotel caters specifically to divers and appears to be a popular vacation spot, ideally situated on the ocean and within a half hour's drive of some fabulous caves.

I'm now in Day #3, having completed four wonderful cave dives in: Grand Cenote Paso de Lagarto, Grand Cenote Cuzan-ha Loop (and one jump beyond), Vaca Ha, and Minotauro. Some details on each follow.


Grand Cenote I've visited many times in the past few years so I won't go into too much detail here. It is still one of my favourite cave dive spots and is currently ranked as the #2 largest underwater cave system in the world as Sistema Sac Aktun (it lost its #1 slot to sistema Ox Bel Ha last month).

This year I purchased a (used) underwater video set-up including two nice 20w halogen pod lights. The video was via a friend of a friend and although it is many years old, it IS digital and it DOES work very well. I spent the past six weeks using it on open water dives so bringing it into the caves was not my first attempts with it. I'm glad I spent the time in open water, because the resulting video footage I got yesterday in Grand Cenote was better than I expected... much of it will be useful should I edit down later.


This morning (Monday 12/10 to be precise) we went to Vaca Ha, a tiny cenote on private property. It started as a difficult restriction then opened to a very nice, but small, cave. Most notable were the long tunnels with copious halocline. I say copious because, being 6th diver in a 7 diver series, the salt/fresh water layer was pretty well disturbed by the time I passed through. Going a few feet either up into fresh or down into salt made radical improvements in visibility. The halocline was at about 60-65 feet, I think. This cave system was pretty deep most of the way, making me thankful for having 36% nitrox. Fortunately no one on any of the dive teams hit deco or it could have been a much longer dive. Vaca Ha was interesting, but on a cave dive scale of 1-10 it only rates about a 3 or 4. In other words, I'd go again if that's where the group goes, but I wouldn't choose it for myself. I also didn't bring either video or DSLR on this dive choosing just to enjoy the cave.

The afternoon was at Minotauro. Also situated on private land, the cenote was large and beautiful. We were the only ones there. An extremely odd bird call taunted us as we suited up -- we never saw the bird but it was kind of spooky. The mosquitoes were also homing in on us quickly so suiting up and jumping in the water became a top priority for me. This time I had the video ready and started out by filming the cenote before diving in. Minotauro was fantastic - it had such a variety of everything any cave diver could ask for. Beautiful formations, ceilings coated with soda straw stalactites, breakdown areas, a tight restriction to squeeze through (only 18" tall!) and lots of halocline to play in. I got what appear to be really good shots of the halocline. I won't know until I can see the video on a larger screen. Believe me, it is very hard to film the halocline and the "green mirror effect." All my previous attempts at doing it using DSLR photography turned out meaningless. Video is the only way to do it.

Tomorrow we are off to Tush Xabaxa (pronounced "toosh kah-basha") where there are said to be mastodon bones. I will be giving the video a rest to do still photography instead. Hopefully I'll get some nice stills posted for you tomorrow.

Beyond Alaska

Oh, wow. It's been six months since I finished the Alaska tour and I never completed the story. Well for anyone reading this I'll have to summarise in the next paragraph. If we meet in person before I forget the details I'll be happy to elaborate with much enthusiasm on the following:

Juneau was pretty, and expensive. I will never forget that a salmon lunch at a remote cottage for two (accessible only by seaplane) cost $400. But the glaciers were most memorable and seeing them by seaplane was a great way to do it. Skagway was my favourite port of call: the town retains its rustic Gold Rush image. The White Pass train ride (diesel powered) was spectacular with fantastic scenery worth every moment sitting out of the car, getting vista photos with the wide angle. I even saw a working steam train in Skagway, doing maintenance duty and not pulling passengers, but running nonetheless! Ketchikan was a let-down partly because we arrived into port so late that the best tours were booked out. We did a last minute taxi tour just to do something and although I got nice shots of the bald eagles it was more disappointment than pleasure. For those who might go on this cruise in the future, save your money for Ketchikan. Some of the more unique local items I saw on the trip were sold there.

Since Alaska I've done the usual summer things, the two most notable being (1) I learned how to swim and (2) Pennsic War. It was uncomfortably humid at War this year, that kept most of the folks sweltering away in their tents instead of being out and about. For merchants that meant drastically reduced sales. No one wanted to think about shopping. Those of you who don't know, I am part owner of a merchant business at Pennsic: we run a cyber cafe for the masses. And I have to say we put a lot of effort this year into improving both appearance and services. It paid off. We did well despite the heat although I am certain had the weather been more tolerable we would have done much better. Anyway I am happy to have done as well as we did, and I personally want to thank everyone who patronised our business and appreciated our upgrades.

I'm back in Cozumel now, on a three month stay. Actually the truth is I am in Akumal a small hotel district south of Playa del Carmen as I write this. This blog took a back seat for too long and I needed to do some quick catch-up. I'd been on Cozumel for six weeks already, doing open water diving and whatnot, then started a week-long tour of cave diving. But that's for the next blog entry, starting in just a moment!

I'll have some nice pictures of Cozumel-so-far-this-trip after I've had a chance to slow down and post-process them. This trip has been somewhat difficult because I've been spending more time per week consulting than I do at home. Great for the income, difficult on the vacation part of my vacation. Oops, did I say I was on vacation?

Juneau (part 2)

Yeah, I'm writing this two weeks after the cruise. But there are still many great memories popping up as I settle back to my daily grind. Especially of Juneau, as this was the nicest town and the most picturesque of the trip. So a few more random thoughts to complete the picture, if you don't mind.

The Taku Lodge was a remarkable little collection of cabins, notable not in how it looked so much as where it was. There is absolutely no road access, all supplies (and people) are brought in only by floatplane or by barge. The story of how it came to be, and the owners that managed it over the past 84+ years or so is what makes the place so remarkable. Here is a link to a fairly thorough history: http://www.wingsairways.com/taku-lodge-history.html.

Long before we arrived in Juneau we were given warnings about black and grizzly bears. They have a set of rules all their own, and once you go venturing outside into Alaska on their territory you're under their rules, not yours. This couldn't have been made more punctual than the sign that greeted people to Taku Lodge.

One of the most memorable things about Juneau, and Taku Lodge, was the smell. The air was FRESH - I mean, unlike anywhere else I'd ever been. And it being the early spring season when we visited there was a smell there (probably a flower I never was able to identify) that remided me -strongly- of the smell of an apiary. That is, when I used to keep bees, there is a distinct sweet smell of bees and beehive when you first open the hive Or standing next to a hive when the weather was warm. That's what the air smelled like. It was a really pleasant memory that I'll never forget.

The floatplane was a DeHaviland Beaver, made back in the late 40's and early 50's as military marine transport and rescue(?) planes. They are extremely well suited to the Alaskan climate and terrain, and even with seven of us packed into the plane it had an impressive amount of power to take off of water. (I've owned a floatplane and I know what it takes to break contact from water and take off.) I was able to negotiate the co-pilot seat. Tracey got the very back seat of the plane, the only seat with views from both sides of the aircraft. We both had SLR cameras and got splendid shots of the glaciers, vistas and waterways. See my web album to view the best of these photos. The most remarkable was, as I'd mentioned earlier, that "glacier blue" colour in the ice which came out extremely well considering the plane was in motion and we had to shoot through the windows.

In case anyone reading this is curious... my camera rig for most of the Alaska trip was a Canon 30D with a 4gb card. The new lens I had just purchased for the trip was the 70-200mm f/4L lens which I chose because of its zoom power, "L" rating and because it was considerably lighter than its f/2.8L older brother. At over $1100 for the lens alone, it was barely affordable but the results are worth it. Lots of people on the cruise had Digital SLR's, probably an equal number of Canon and Nikon owners. I loaned my lenses to a few Canon owners who were using the (blah!) 18-55mm kit lens and they were all impressed. I'm telling you, if I were a Canon salesman I could probably earn my way on trips like this just selling lenses.

Sailing the Alaskan Coast - Day 3

Day 3 Memoirs

Welcome to our Alaska cruise. I'm starting blog entries on Day #3 (Juneau) because I didn't remember I had a blog until just a few hours ago! Many interesting things have happened but I'll have to write about them later. Here's starting from yesterday (Sunday, June 3rd).

After seeing so many eagles on the train trip up from Seattle to Vancouver I shouldn't be so surprised to see another one. But this morning one went past the window of our cabin, passing a scant 20 feet away!! Oh, if only I had my camera in hand at that moment.

The weather cooperated magnificently today -- we weren't sure if any days would have good weather so we'd thought the first chance at seeing glaciers on a day without rain would be one we try to book an air flight. These tend to be between expensive and downright highway robbery. But it's one of those things you have to say, "Well I'll only be this way once in my life and its the only chance I'll have."

Finding tour operators in Juneau was a frustrating mystery. Where were they? We wandered Juneau's nice, clean streets with elegant shops aimlessly and finally found the "discount" shops. Not many, but we managed to be persuaded into a flight tour over five glaciers, with a salmon bake dinner thrown in to boot -- at the low price of only $225 each. Well, low it isn't but it was a lot less than taking a $398 helicopter tour if we'd booked on the boat.

This tour was to the Taku Glacier Lodge (long and very interesting history about this place -- ask me about it later) by seaplane, dinner and a short hike, and then back by seaplane to Juneau. All in about 3 hours. This had better be one helluva good time at $75/hour.

The salmon bake was quite good, better actually than most of the food we get on the ship. Fresh salmon, caught 16 miles upstream, then roasted on an open alderwood fire (not baked) to just about mouth-watering perfection. Add to this tasty beans (homemade home cookin' style), slaw and some of the most flavourful biscuits I'd ever had and I was quite impressed with the meal even though it was pretty much standard homestyle fare. It just happened to be the best of its class.

One of the most impressive parts of the meal was to learn that the ice used in our drinks was actually from remnants of the Hole-in-the-Wall Glacier across the river! I was literally drinking melted ice formed from snow that fell 4,000 to 5,000 years ago! Talk about the novelties of life.

The flights to and from the Lodge were... well, spectacular. I'd never seen glaciers in person and didn't even know the term "glacier blue" until I was hit rather suddenly with it in tiny pools just below me. I used a lot of digital film on these blips trying to get the best representation of that blue that I could. I only had a little bit of time to review the photos but I have to say that even in film the colour of "glacier blue" comes out rather well.

After morning whale watching, snow-capped mountains' glory, harbor seals, Juneau and glaciers, downloading the camera cards took quite a while. All told almost 500 pictures were taken on two dSLR cameras. 3.5 gigabytes!!

Today was a four meal day, since we took the sushi bar option for late dinner, just before the evening entertainment. Imagine this... five hours of All-You-Can- Eat sushi every night of the cruise! My first two meals of the day were lighter than average, but add to that the salmon bake and sushi and I started to wonder for the first time this trip how much I was going to weigh by the end.

Tonight's entertainer was ventriloquist Don Bryan of Canada. His bio provided to us in our daily schedule was impressive so we decided to go. A lot of his schtick was a bit old, dated, stale and sometimes too racy. However two of his acts really shined: one was with nothing more than a tennis ball and two O-rings (another great short story behind this I'll tell you later). But it was his last section that had me laughing hysterically, my eyes tearing so much I couldn't see for ten minutes straight! He used a live member of the audience as his 2nd "dummy" -- for this he chose a man about 40 years old and fairly stocky. He used touch contact to emulate puppet control (by squeezing the man's shoulder the man was supposed to open his mouth but not say anything). With a series of three different voices, each more ludicrous than the last, the whole audience was lost to laughter. I hadn't laughed so hard in anytime I can remember of recent past.

Tonite while in Juneau we once again cheated the evil Cruise Line of their money grubbing capitalistic greed. I brought a really powerful Wi-Fi antenna (15 dbi for those who are curious) and started poking around the town across the water from the boat. Our room was not dock side this port so the nearest houses were 2 or more miles across the water on the opposite side of the fjord. It took three attempts but found an unsecured router I was able to establish free service. Voila! And for all of 45 glorious minutes we had access to our email. Thank you, to whomever you were, for your generosity of sharing your internet. If I can do this at our other two ports of call we would have saved at least $100 in access fees.

Turks and Caicos Explorer

Well... our time in Cozumel had ended for this year. It was 100+ glorious days on the beautiful "Island of the Swallows" with scuba diving galore. I think my final tally was 95 dives making my total dives to date around 303. But Wait... there's more!

For six months we'd been planning to do the Turks and Caicos Explorer, a liveaboard run by Explorer Ventures. Our first experience with this company was two years ago on the Caribbean Explorer II, an excellent scuba trip with an itinerary that had us diving in St. Kitts, Statia (St. Eustatius) and Saba. Could this trip be as enjoyable and perfect as the last one? Read on to find out...

The Turks and Caicos are a small set of islands near the Bahama Island chain. They are a non-sovereign territory of the United Kingdom. Scuba diving is so popular here that on the immigration form there are checkboxes just for scuba as your reason for visiting. In terms of commercialization the island seems moderately built-up but there are no cruise ship visits here that I know of. The island's economy and general appearance reminded me a lot of St. Croix. Food is very expensive here: a simple snack/dinner for two consisting of one appetizer, a glass of wine, a bottle of beer (local, tasted like rusty pipes) and some water came to $50.

Our group consisted of four people: Andrew, Kathleen (whom we'd met on the Caribbean Explorer II trip), Tracey and myself. The passenger list showed there were a total of 15 divers for this trip. The boat has a maximum of 20 passengers.

We arrived a day early, partly to give time to decompress after a day of travel and partly to add assurance that we wouldn't miss our boat departure. Four others on this trip did miss the first day because of weather delays in Minnesota. For our first night we stayed at a lovely hotel near the town of Providenciales called the Miramar Resort. On the day of our embarkment, the T&C Explorer had already arranged our taxi to the dock so we had an easy morning walking around "town" and relaxing until the pickup at 3pm. With the exception of small groups of hotels at beaches and a few retail shops to keep their tourists happy, we didn't see much in the way of a downtown area.

We arrived at the boat mid-afternoon and were greeted warmly by several of the crew. I then spent several hours assembling the digital camera housing. Unlike the Cozumel trip, I was most pleased to discover that not a single thing was left at home. Relief.

On to the business of diving. This boat trip was a 7-day itinerary very similar to Caribbean Explorer II. Five days of diving with up to five dives a day, then a last day with two early morning dives. That's a total of 27 dives you can do in one week!! A daily plan kind of went like this:

7am - Light breakfast

8am - First dive

9:30am - snack

10:30 - Second dive

12noon - Lunch

1:30pm - Third dive

3pm - snack

4:30pm - Fourth dive

6pm - Dinner

8pm - Night dive

Some of the most awesome things we saw on this dive trip:

A wild dolphin played with us! No shit! After 300+ dives this is the first and only time I have seen a dolphin underwater.

Good picture of a Reef Squid at night, showing the mesmerizing galaxy of colours they display under our artificial lights (see pic)

Humpback Whales (two adults and their calf) although they avoided our boat, probably protecting the calf

Tracey found a blennie that wasn't in the books, apparently the Reef folks are just now classifying it. She's excited about the find nonetheless.

For the most part the dive sites had much the same topographical dive profile, same depth profile, and generally the same fish and corals. There were variations in the health of the reef and sizes of fish schools but in truth it was a slight disappointment not to have a bit more variety in the dives. Added to this was the limited visibility, usually about 50-70 feet. However this didn't deter my main activity which was underwater photography. Each site had limitless opportunities at macro and wide-angle, and I made use of both configurations throughout the trip.

For a quick look at (unprocessed) photos from the trip, go here:
My Google/Picasa photo album

I ended the week with 22 dives (total dives to date = 325), approximately 1,100 photos, no sunburn but plenty of smiles. Would I go on this trip again? Probably not, but not because of the boat or the crew. Instead I would choose another destination like maybe Roatan or Caymans. When spending this kind of money on a dive trip I'd like to get a wider range of dive experience. It was great to dive Turks and Caicos once, but I don't feel an urge to return anytime soon.

Did Explorer Ventures live up to their reputation? They sure did! Would I book another liveaboard tour with them in the future? Absolutely.

Room of Tears

Although it has been several days since my last cave dive, I am rewinding the clock a little bit to remind myself how much fun cave diving is. If all goes well I should be doing my next cave dives in a few days.

I feel I have been remiss because I talked about the Cuzan Na loop in Sistema Sac Aktun but on the same day of that first visit I also went to the highly famed "Room of Tears" in Sistema Aktun Ha. This beautiful picture is just one of many excellent shots. L-O-O-K at all the soda straw stalactites up on the ceiling. G-A-Z-E admiringly at the beautiful colours of each of the pillars lining this room. Room of Tears got its name (according to what I've read on the internet) because the first pioneers to visit the place were so struck by the beauty that they were literally in tears as they beheld it. Truly, this is a marvelous place and should be on every cave diver's "must visit" list after getting full cave certification.

The dive is not a particularly difficult one, or at least I didn't find it so. But the passage to get to the Room is quite narrow (qualifies as a Minor Restriction for a notable distance) and must be navigated at awkward angles in order to avoid doing damage to the cave. This was made extra complicated as all the members of our group were wearing and breathing from stage bottles for the dive. You can see from this picture how it felt to go through one of the restrictions. Now, if you're even the slightest bit claustrophobic, then try not to imagine doing this while under 80 feet of water and no easy way to turn around if you get the heebie jeebies. Also try not to remember that your only exit is 600 or more feet behind you! If you are considering this dive, make damn sure your buoyancy control is nigh perfect before you do it.

If you look closely in the picture you will see how this part of the pasageway has been shaved smooth by the passage of divers over time.

Macro World

Please click on photo to get full size!

Although underwater photography is a relatively new addition to my scuba activities, it is one that I have undertaken with immense passion. Photography can easily triple or quadruple your total scuba budget! I am very fortunate to have been loaned/gifted a compleat Digital SLR camera and housing setup by Andrew Donelson, a scuba friend we'd met on the island of St. Croix almost exactly a year ago today. This rig is the source of over 95% of the wonderful pictures that I have been showing on my Cozumel photo albums. My trip to Cozumel has been an excellent learning theatre for me to refine my photography skills and to stretch the camera's capabilities with different lenses and accessories.

This week I just started diving with a 14mm extension tube on my 17-85mm macro lens. This makes a Super Macro mode with a focal distance ranging from about 1-20cm. In other words, I can pretty much put the tip of the dome port right on the subject and still get it to focus!!! You can imagine how much fun this has been to learn to use. My first trial dive was off the boat pier just a block from where I'm living. Not a particularly gorgeous spot but it does have a surprising variety of fish and coral life... including seahorses, flying gurnards, angelfish, scorpionfish, blennies and the like. Pretty much the same things you see on the reefs you pay $80 to visit but in miniature. That is to say, most of the fishy things are juveniles. (Except for the blennies. They never get very big!)

Today's dive was Tracey and my 5^th anniversary, and my 300^th logged dive to date! What great milestones. We chose to do a shore dive near the south cruise ship pier at a place commonly called The Junkyard because of an old airplane that was sunk here for a movie a long time ago. This is also a popular snorkel location due to its proximity to the cruise ship pier and indeed we often saw people floating above us. I like to think that snorkelers are jealous of us scuba divers because we get to interact with the reef so much more closely, but to tell the truth they probably don't even notice us.

Great close-up shots of all sorts of things I couldn't shoot before! Corals, blennies, jawfish, christmas tree worms, pipefish, even a colourful starfish! Then a reef squid showed up -- definitely one of the more intelligent creatures on the reef, as it played with us, darting all around us and changing all sorts of colours, but never getting too close. Ugh! Wrong lens setup for this type of creature but how I wish I could have caught it on film! It was a big one too. We stayed around watching it for at least 5 minutes until one of us got low on air and called the dive.

It was a fun time, and undoubtedly the best $25 we ever spent to make an 85 minute dive. ($13 for renting two tanks and $12 for taxi trips). "Babieca" was the dive shop at Hotel La Ceiba and they were very friendly with clean facilities. The all-wood pier looked like it had been built yesterday. Diving in and getting out was easy, with things to see as soon as you got in the water. We'll be back!

Notes on the photos

The scorpionfish was the 2nd one I found that dive. It was out in the open and made a perfect photography subject since I could shoot it from several creative angles. Virtually every shot came out in focus. This dive I was experimenting with much higher f-stop and variable flash angles. I learned a lot from this and you can see the results... beautiful shots! This shot is about f/18; normally I shoot underwater about f/8 or f/11. You can see the excellent depth of field. Believe it or not what you see in this picture is full frame.

Anenomes we see virtually every dive but what I find interesting is that each anenome has a different colour for its tips. This one seemed like it hadn't made up its mind yet but I loved the contrast of mauve stalks with tinges of green.

The last picture is a jawfish, which hides in a hole in the sand and "flies" just above it to feed on passing krill or whatever they eat. They are extremely skiddish and I was able to get a good shot of this one only by holding steady for about three minutes until it felt I wasn't a threat. I will note that, like a good scuba photographer, my fins never once touched the coral. I had anchored myself with my left index finger to a rock outcropping while holding the camera and shutter knob with my right.

Notes on Macro Setup

I have only one macro lens, the Canon 17-85mm EF-S. It is a good piece of hardware and has served me well for a wide range of shooting both above water and below. My professional photographer friend Doug Plummer once loaned me a nifty gadget to play with and learn about shooting really small subjects, like bugs in flowers and the hairs on the top of your toe. This magical hardware is the Canon EF12-II extension tube which fits both the EF and EF-S series lenses.

I was so impressed that I soon bought one but my intention was to use it in my microcontroller circuit design career and for documenting machining work. I don't think it occurred to me to try it underwater until a few months ago. I wasn't even certain it would work inside the Aquatica dome port -- truth to tell it doesn't quite fit and there are some complications. Namely, the extension makes useless the zoom gear so I can't do any focal point adjustment, and the lens cannot be extended to its fullest macro position so I don't have optimal focusing. Small prices to pay for the results I am getting!

After two dives with this set-up I feel there is still some fine tuning to be done, but I can already see its limitations. Particularly in photo quality. I'll be shopping around for another macro lens (probably one of the Canon "L" lenses) but for now I have to say the EF12-II extension tube is an excellent solution for the price. Which is about $80.

Nohoch Na Chich (cave dive)

When people talk about the most beautiful caves to dive in the world they probably have some criteria in mind. Mine would include: multicolored formations, flowstone in all imagineable shapes and sizes including stuff I can't imagine, rooms with thousands of soda straw stalactites and walls that change character from one passage to the next. But when it comes down to it, there are probably five or so that most cave divers who visit the Riviera Maya will agree are the "best of the best." Nohoch Na Chich will undoubtedly be in that list.

For this dive, Glenn and I were required to contract with a dive shop that had a qualified cave guide on staff. Why? Apparently the landowners where the caves are situated are becoming more and more concerned about liability, both for themselves and for the caves. This can be a good thing, the caves could be better protected. But it is bad too: hiring guides is expensive and how much liability will be realised is dubious. In the end, the cave community suffers because many caves are now priced out of the reach of anything more than a one-time visit.

To make a comparison on price: our visit to Sac Aktun (including site fees, double tanks, renting a car, petrol and ferry trip from/to Cozumel) came to about $76 per person, two dives, using one set of doubles each. Protec, the company we dove with, required one set of doubles per dive and charged me for something I'd never had to pay for before: an air fill for each tank. This was in addition to the tank rental fee! Thus, the total came to $194 per person including the guide, transport, tanks, cenote fees and air fill, plus ferry trip from/to Cozumel. You can see why I bellyache about the difference in cost! Mind you, I think Protec is a really decent operation and I understand the need to make profit to stay in business. From a budget cave diver's standpoint, though, it looks like which caves we can visit is going to be a shrinking list.

Enough politics. Now about the dive.

Our guide for the trip was Dallas, a very pleasant chap with a British passport who calls Marseille, France home. We planned two dives in the upstream sections along different guidelines, making about two jumps on each dive. Access to Cenote Nohoch was by a narrow gravel road, typical and familiar to most of the cave dive sites in the area. On the way out we passed a white truck with tanks in the back; we weren't the first divers at the cave today. But it seemed like they were leaving rather early....



At the site we are greeted by the landowner representative and our fees are paid. Glenn and I are handed a sheet of paper in a protective sleeve which essentially read: "it has come to our attention that certain cave divers have take it upon themselves to change the lines and markers within Nohoch Na Chich. Let it be known that the landowners have not authorised such changes and anyone caught doing so will be banned." Apparently, the truck we passed earlier was none other than Steve Gerrard, and he had just been banned from Nohoch. Wish I were a fly on the wall half an hour ago!



Off we go. This cenote is more commonly used by AllTourNative Tours to do snorkeling. It certainly seems a nice place to snorkel but the star attraction is undoubtedly the cave system. And system it is! Dallas shows us a hand-drawn line map of the general cave plan. There are passages and jumps all over the place. A cave diver's paradise. Unfortunately, as is company policy, the first dive will be to a maximum penetration time of 45 minutes so that we can be evaluated by Dallas as to our buoyancy and competence. There are also some drills to do to demonstrate basic skills before the dive, but this is not unexpected or very noteworthy.



I will have to repeat what so many cave divers before me have already said -- Nohoch na Chich is an incredibly diverse cave with some of the most bizarre flowstone formations I've seen in the Riviera Maya. There are frozen waterfalls everywhere. Areas where the hundreds of stalactites look like upside-down pine trees, with spines all over. Complex rosettes in all shapes and larger than life.



*FLASH* *Flash* *flash* *flash* goes the camera, then *No Flash*. DAMN. The TTL card cut out again!! And I thought I had that problem solved. So, less than halfway into our penetration and before I could take pictures of the really interesting stuff, the camera is out of commission. I stow it under my arm and just enjoy the rest of the dive.

During the surface interval I madly tear apart the housing. Everything checks out, I can't find any water in the connectors that would've caused the problem. But I do have a replacement battery for the TTL card. Here goes, fingers crossed. Luckily, that seemed to solve the problem and on the next dive I make up for the first one by taking a whopping 250+ pictures!

Our 2^nd dive was to a different passage section, still upstream, but I requested a different plan to extend our dive time effectively by about 20 minutes. This involved shooting up one passage, backing up to the last jump, then laying a reel and taking that leftward passage. Both directions were spectacular, but the leftward jump was remarkable! The tiny room at the end of the line was barely big enough to fit the three of us. It was characterized by a perfectly flat ceiling but ringed by the soda straw stalactites that had been following us everywhere. Still pictures cannot do this room justice -- once again I wish I had video capability.

The dive ended at 105 minutes. A wonderful time and a great set of dives. Time to start saving pennies for another visit to this marvelous cave.

The question I have to ask myself now is, was it better than my favourite cave system, Sac Aktun? Maybe my answer will change as I think about it later, but for now the answer is "no." Sac Aktun still holds a special place in my heart, it seems to have more personality and more welcome-factor going for it.

Underwater Marriage Proposal!

I met Josh Ginsberg on my morning dive (same one with Mr. Shark, see below) and asked if I would be available in the afternoon. What for? "I'm going to ask my girlfriend to marry me on the afternoon dive" says he. That was way too cool for me to pass up.

Off we go, things are off to a slow start as the usual current over Reef de Paraiso is either uncooperative or missing. Anyway, off to the water we go, though I was introduced to the lovely lady (I'm sorry I don't recall her name) I hadn't made any mention about the camera or what was up. Big surprise, you see. I planned to play it cool on the reef until I saw something was up and then casually approach while getting photos.

The set-up was near perfect. Josh writes on his brand new slate "I love you more than anything in the world" and shows it to her. (I take a picture.) He takes the slate back as she looks at me confused... What is up with this photographer? and writes on the other side "Will you marry me? YES NO" with circle one implied. Of course she circled YES and he pulls out a ring, fits it to her finger, they hug, even pull out their regulators and kiss!! (really sweet) and are spending the whole dive together holding hands. I can't begin to imagine what she's thinking all this time.

The reef was asleep other than that, the really fun stuff like pelagics, eels and scorpionfish just weren't around today. But for one happy couple this will be a dive never to forget! I burned a disc of all the day's photos and gave them a copy of these great memories.

Shark Encounters II

Yes, time again for another "No spit, there I was!" story. Well most of you have probably heard by now about last week's dive adventure where we came across a small-ish sized shark at Caracolillo Reef... and I watched (in horror and humor) as divemaster Mariano took his regulator out of his mouth and then proceeded slowly to [almost] bite the shark's tail! (Pictures don't lie!)

Well, this story is Shark Encounter part Deux... this time on Dalila Reef, an area similar in topography, depth and fish life to Caracolillo. Merrily going about our business, on our radar scopes shows up The Mother of All Nurse Sharks! And this one wasn't bothering to hide under anything (it was too big to be scared of anything); it was out in open view in the sand! Now, this thing was BIG. And WIDE. I would guess it was a good 7 to 7 1/2 feet long.

Today I chose to take the wide angle in the open ocean, after having good success with it in the last cave dive. I've got it set at widest angle and I'm slowly trying to frame the whole shark in the viewfinder -- big shark means I don't have to get too close, right? -- so I get it framed and *flash* *flash* go some very nice shots of this monster. Then I look away from the viewfinder and find I'm only 2 feet away from it! Hooboy! Niiiice shark. Time for some slow adjustment of my proximity. Well, truthfully, I'm not daunted or the least bit concerned... maybe I should be as its clearly the largest one I've come across.

Mariano then drops down in front of this beast and I swear they must be having a staring contest. Mariano would have lost, sharks don't blink. *flash* *flash* more good shots. Okay, thinks I. It's my turn to impress the rest of the dive team. Took the regulator out of my mouth and heeere I go for the bite! Well, this shark spooked a lot easier than the last one and it really didn't want me that close to its tail. It zipped around 180 degrees and pretty much passed right under me, teeth first, and disappeared. *flash* more pictures *flash*.

Great photo-op day.

What Is Cozumel?

Ah, but I must digress. What/where is Cozumel and why am I here?

Isla de Cozumel, "Island of the Swallows" in Mayan. This tiny island is off the eastern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. Its economic success is primarily due to two different tourist-based industries: cruise ship travellers and scuba divers. The latter are a funny bunch, they stay on the island sometimes for months at a time and spend lots of money, but they don't buy many trinkets and aren't big nighttime party animals. The cruisers (I refer to them as those Bote People for short) are probably a bigger source of income for the economy in general. They're only here for eight hours of the day, but they come in droves six days a week, probably as many as 20,000 people per day. And they're rich and they buy lots of alcohol, trinkets and tours. The people of Cozumel welcome all of us with open arms.

Living on Cozumel is not something I ever considered until it happened. My company was having an all too rare slow period due to the holidays and there turned out to be nothing pressing at home that needed my attention. So at the end of our annual 3-week stay (it usually starts a week or two before Thanksgiving) Tracey and I looked at each other and said, Why Not? Thus began our new extended adventures. It will be just short of four months when we finally leave in February.

What's surprising is that even during high season (December to February) there's still plenty of vacancies here. That may have something to do with 2005's two record setting, highly destructive hurricanes. Or maybe not. Whatever the reason, finding inexpensive digs is not hard if you don't mind doing some legwork. Speaking a little bit of Espanol doesn't hurt one bit either.

When people find out about how long we've been here, one question invariably comes up: "What in the world do you do for a living?" usually followed by "How do you manage to travel for such a long time?" Those who know us know why (and since you're here you probably know too). But in case you don't some clues might be found on Tracey's blog website. Suffice to say after living in Ireland, I've adapted to having a more minimalist lifestyle.

In no particular order, here are some categorised impressions I have of Cozumel and Mexican lifestyle, as viewed from the eyes of this here tourist:

Food

Common misconception is that the food is unhealthy for gringoes: salad and fruits cannot be washed enough to be safe, vegetables should only be cooked. The water will give you Montezuma's. Well, it is true that you don't drink the tap water here (even the locals don't) but it is safe enough to shower in and brush your teeth. For everything else bottled water comes in 5 gallon jugs at a cheap price. All the local 'tiendas' (corner stores or 'mini supers' as they oxymoronically call them) carry them so you don't have to port them far.

Produce from the grocery store is harmless and has never made me ill. I've never gotten sick from food at any restaurant either. Its high time for gringo opinions of Mexian food to change!

The quality of restaurants on Cozumel is excellent with many gourmet-level within walking distance of the square. My favourites include (in no specific order) Casa Denis, Prima, La Choza, Manati, Rockin' Java, Coco's (only open for desayunos/breakfast), Le Chef, Midori. Midori is the only near-Japanese sushi restaurant on Cozumel and when I need a break from local fare, this is always good for a fix. The Coffee Bean is the best place for a cuppa joe, however be warned that their beans are really strong in caffeine. I've been told that Starbucks will be invading Cozumel by May 2007.

One of my favourite lunch places is a little take-out on Avenida 30 between Calle 5 y 7 which sells "pollos carbon" or barbeque chicken. For the whopping sum of US$6.50 (70 pesos) you can get a whole chicken with trimmings of tortillas, onions, salsa and rice. Great for two meals feeding two people.

There are a few restaurants I don't recommend, which include: Palmeras, Suzanne's, French Quarter, and the three outdoor restaurants on the same row as Casa Denis. These places either have disappointing food, bad service and/or will try to cheat you on the bill. La Mision on Calle 3 used to be good a few years ago but the portions and quality have slipped in recent years.

I really love local food but to tell the truth I'm accustomed to a wider ethnic variety. After just two weeks on Cozumel my taste buds start to suffocate from boredom. Oh, what I'd give right now for a bite of Ethiopian food! It's been *weeks* since I last had anything that tasted like Thai food. Oh, and how I miss Athens Grill (Greek) from back home....

San Miguel

Downtown San Miguel, the only city on Cozumel, is where we live. Just two blocks from the central Plaza. The plaza here is beautifully landscaped and has been very active especially during the Christmas holidays. Tracey wrote some stuff in her blog so you should go read that. For festivities, the big day is Sunday where the locals have the day off (sort of) to take time for church and family. In the evening the Plaza has Latin music played by a local(?) band which is quite good. The Plaza is active at every corner and not only do the stores stay open late (they'd be foolish not to!) but you will find street painters (they use spray paint cans as their medium - fascinating to watch), clowns, hair braiders and stands that sell churros and french fries fresh made.

Noise

Since we work during the day in our flat, we get bombarded with noise of all sorts. Mexican culture is notoriously sonorous and Cozumel is no exception. A lot of the cars aren't well maintained (too expensive to do so) and usually the muffler goes first. Especially on the scooters which are extremely popular here. If the local policia wanted to have a new fundraiser, all they'd have to do is enact a noise ordinance.

During the day we get the occasional clop-clop-clop-clop-clop as the horse-drawn taxis go by carrying bote people back and forth between town and the southern pier. At the corner opposite the flat there's a dog whose main purpose in life is to bark at every horse as it passes. I sympathise with the horses. This same said dog is also the source of the "guano de perro" we find along our route. Translate that as you like. Use google if you need help.

About twice a week a man walks by that sings out "QueeeeeEEEEEESsssooOOOOOOOOOO WAAAAA-KAAA-KAAAA" as he carries a box over his head. The first two syllables are sung in this amazing tenor voice that carries for over a block. The last part is more or less shouted and to hear it you wouldn't think it was coming from the same person. I had to ask a local (well, an expat US cit) what this was. Apparently it is Queso Oaxaca, or cheese made in the style originated in the Oaxaca region of Mexico. It is a string cheese, creamy and sometimes a little sweet. Somewhat similar to provolone.

The policia here actively enforce the (not clearly marked) No Parking laws. Everyday you can hear them as they pull up to an illegally parked car and blat their sirens a few times. They then wait there for the allotted 2-3 minutes. If the car isn't moved they then go into action, writing a ticket and removing the license plates. They don't tow the vehicle, but you have to go pay a hefty fine to get your plate back. Seems like a fairly efficient enforcement system, however I see lots of vehicles driving around with no plates! Do they ever get stopped?

Scuba Duba... what?

There are more Scuba Divers per capita here than anywhere I've ever been. Scuba is like a third language here. Anytime you go out to dinner you're going to sit next to a table of divers who have no choice but to talk about where they dove that day, how much air they consumed, what gear they want to buy/try next, etc etc. I'm sure the waiters tuned it out long ago.

There are also more scuba dive shops than you'd think possible. And they range in size from a closet to... well, none of them are very big. They don't have to be because most of a diver's time is spent on a boat and not in the shop.

Scuba divers in general are an older crowd, with a median age probably in mid to late 40's. That makes this resort town look kind of geriatric by Club Med vacationer standards. By contrast, Playa del Carmen (the sister town on the mainland immediately across the ferry) is a much younger, hip and active generation "The Young and The Restless" with a more active partygoer mentality. If you're single and looking, don't stay in Cozumel on your vacation. Stay in Playa, but come here for the scuba diving.

Sac Aktun at Gran Cenote

January 25, 2007. Without any doubt, Sac Aktun is my absolutest, bestest, most fav'rite place to scuba dive in all the wide world. Sac Aktun also gets credit for being the #1 motivation for getting my Full Cave certification for many reasons, the most explainable being that it has been photographed so much that I couldn't help but fall in love with the place even before I dove there the first time. But that's another story for another day.

Pictures here, for now.

Thursday was my third dive trip to Sac Aktun, the second trip with a camera, and the first time without a paid guide in this cave. My partner was Glenn, a bicycle shop owner from Cincinnati. The two of us met through German Yanez, and we'd done other dives together over the past two weeks. Our decision to go without a guide was based on two factors: (1) cost: with a guide it is $145 each for two dives and to do it ourselves came out to about $72, even including car rental and ferry crossing; (2) relative confidence: we'd dove Sac Aktun a week previous and knew generally where we were going. We did a lot of homework before the trip and made solid plans for our dives the night before. There is a saying in cave diving that goes "plan your dive and dive your plan." Good philosophy and it served us well.

The day before we met at The Coffee Bean in Cozumel. This turns out to be my first (and fortunately, only) bad decision in hindsight. I've decided that The Coffee Bean is passively trying to get me killed (read this lightly as a JOKE, please) as their coffee must have 3 times the normal amount of caffeine as anywhere else. I had one iced mocha at 3pm which should have washed through my system by bedtime. Nope! I had a totally sleepless night, not a good thing before going on a tec dive. The last time this happened was... unfortunately... during my full cave class which of course was much more critical. On that day we were having evening class at The Coffee Bean and I asked for 'cafe hielado, descafeinado por favor!!' and when it arrived tried to confirm with '?esta descafeinado?' and got the affirmative from the waiter. Half an hour later, the freaky and all too familiar caffeine buzz came over me and though I tried to detox by drinking a whole gallon of water before bedtime but to no avail. It was a sleepless night and the next day's cave class with moderate sleep dep.

Anyway, I'm getting used to cave diving with no sleep and in truth it didn't effect my performance, safety or enjoyment as far as I can tell. But did I ever sleep like a rock Thursday night!!

7:45am: Met Glenn at the ferry terminal. First expense is MX $110 (US$10) for the ferry crossing to Playa Del Carmen. Winds were heavy and the local ports had closed traffic for smaller boats... too bad for many dive operators on Cozumel. The Belinda (my usual dive boat while on Cozumel, through Aqua Safari) couldn't go out. Oh well, perfect day to go cave diving!

8:45am: Ferry landed, it was surprisingly smooth trip, very little tossing and no sick passengers. I don't get seasick myself, but you know, if someone next to you loses it, it doesn't make you feel very good. Anyway, we collected our dive gear (careful with that camera!!) and trudged the six blocks to the Hertz satellite office.

9:15am: At the Hertz main office we get our car, a light blue Chrysler ATOS nearly spankin' brand new with only 1023 km on the odometer and just a single paint scratch on the right front wheel well. Hertz doesn't try to hassle with me on insurance and the agreed rate is MX $340 ($31). Nice. Off we go.

10:30am: Arrive at Sac Aktun after picking up tanks along the way. The entrance fee is MX $100 (or US$10) and after only a little hassle we are allowed to drive behind the fence to the tables closer to the cenote. We had picked up two sets of doubles and a single 80 cf tank that I will use as a stage bottle on the first dive. Glenn's air consumption is lower than mine, probably because I am blowing a lot of air with the camera the whole dive. (Better to use up some air than to have bad buoyancy control, I say.) The stage bottle will be my main air source for the first dive which also makes air planning easy. My turn point is when the single stage tank is empty, that's 1/3 of my air.

There are two other dive teams here and we ask them about their plans to see if we'll have any conflicts. One 3-person team is going our way, to Cuzan Na loop, with a video rig 3x the size of my DSLR. That's also our dive plan so we'll have to watch for them on the way in. The other team is going to Paso del Lagarto which we'll be doing our 2^nd dive so no worries there.

11:00am It takes Glenn inexplicably longer to get ready than any other dive partner I've had in the past so the other dive team is a good 20-30 minutes in the water before we finish our equipment matching and S-drills. For the S-drill I took the camera to make sure it could be clipped so as not to interfere with the long hose (successful!) but left the stage bottle on the dock. I clipped on the stage bottle, deployed the hose and off we go. Joy! Bliss! Cave Beauty!

Sac Aktun is unlike other cave systems in so many ways, one of the first remarkable things is how welcoming the cave seems from the outset. Beautiful columns of formations are just inside the cave mouth and all along the the tunnel as we lay our line from the cavern line to the main line. It's almost as if Sac Aktun is silently telling me "You're very welcome here; I really want to show you my beauty and have you treasure it." The dive team that went to Lagarto passes us on the way in; I guess they called the dive early or had some problem. Either way there's only one other line into the cave that we parallel as we go in. Down we go, Glenn in the lead running the spools and markers. (This was agreed the day before, if I had to rent the car and do the driving, the least he could do was lead the dive.)

Our plan is to go to the Cuzan-na / Lagarto split and observe where the jump to Lagarto is, mark our passing with a cookie but continue on the main line on to Cuzan Na (Cuzanah?) and set up a circuit on the loop, then depending on conditions continue on the circuit to the right (counter-clockwise) or retrace and do the loop clockwise, retrieving the reel on the way out. Total dive plan: 90-120 minutes, turn on air is Glenn's 1/3rds which is a magic number of 900 psi.

Along the mainline we pass someone's jump line where I'd never seen one before and later I realise that this is the shortcut (very long jump) to Cenote Ho Tul. We're taking the longer way 'round to the same place, but that's mostly because I'd never done that jump before and that we wanted to look at the Lagarto jump before we did it.

Sure enough as we get close to Cenote Ho Tul we pass the spool end of the jump. The video team is just ahead of us. I had studied pictures from our previous dive as to where the jump across Cenote Ho Tul looked like, so I was watching for it. Also, we should have seen the other team's jump spool at that point so we could lay ours. HOWEVER, the other team failed to place an arrow at their jump and their line looked identical to the mainline. We don't fully realise this until we reach their jump spool. Glenn is confused by this and I realise that the tie-off was indeed some ways back -- not our error, really, but bad protocol by the other dive team. Back we go and we lay our line properly, with arrow, at the end of the mainline. As we cross Ho Tul with our own spool the other dive team is coming out, retrieving their reel. We wave anyway (no use getting pissed at someone else's ignorance, really) and onwards we go.

The Cuzan-Na loop is not too far from there but when we get there the right jump is badly silted up -- why do camera crews always do this? Its bad enough to see open water photographers ripping up the ocean reefs, but in a cave it is much worse! Cave formations (speleotherms) do not grow back!!! Ever!! More curses, short lived, but it is now up to Glenn to decide on the plan. He is undaunted by the silt and low vis and made the same decision I would have... lay the jump through the silt and proceed in the counter-clockwise direction of the loop with the assumption that the vis will clear soon with the downstream flow as we are still heading upstream. Good guess and we're soon back in 200 ft vis just in time to view the Cuzan-na Room (our previous guide referred to this as the Crystal Palace) in all its amazing splendor.

This trip was my first time ever diving with the 10-22mm wide-angle lens. I made this decision specifically for this room, which must have 3,000-5,000 stalactites of all imagineable sizes. Unfortunately, I don't have a zoom gear for this lens... not yet anyway, it should be in my hands on Tuesday. So I had to make the problematic decision to fix the zoom at 10mm before the dive and live with it, hoping that there would be enough flash from the single strobe to cover such a wide angle. As it turned out, this worked GREAT and I now have relatively nice pictures of the Cuzan-na room... as well as everything between there and the entrance.

I think that alot has to be said for Canon lenses. This 10-22mm lens has a f/2.8 which isn't the strongest for this kind of work, but you can tell just by looking at the size of the optics that the light gathering power of this lens will be superior. And indeed I am very pleased with the results. There is some vignetting which is expected with such wide fields of view. There are also focus problems at the outermost edges but I don't know if this is caused by aberration due to the dome port or maybe my f-stop needs to be lower. More dives will tell me which it is.

Our way out of the cave is uneventful; I'd been using the stage bottle the whole dive but switched over to my back gas about 500' from the entrance when I reached 500 psi. Though I am sure I wouldn't panic when the regulator suddenly pulls hard, its not a good idea to drink a tank dry if you don't have to. We are taught as open water scuba divers to leave pressure in the bottle or risk getting water seepage into the tank, potentially damaging the tank and your regulator.

12:40ish'pm We surface at Gran Cenote after 98 minutes of total time. Very satisfying dive in all respects. We decided earlier in the day not to leave site and buy lunch in Tulum like we did on our guided trip because we weren't sure if the trolls at the gate would charge us a second time. Also, since Sac Aktun is a max. 40' dive (average 32-35' for whole dive) there is not so much concern about nitrogen uptake on such long profiles. But to be extra safe we had done a good 6-7 minute safety stop @ 12' in the cenote before surfacing. Fun time to play with all the freshwater fish that are all around us like flies.

It is pouring rain as we exit the cenote. Never a dry moment, I guess. In a way I welcome it because it means that the mosquitoes will be kept at bay. They aren't horrible today, but since my cave instructor came down with Dengue Fever two months ago which put him out of commission for 10 days, I've been extra concerned about mosquito exposure. Especially because I forgot to bring bug juice with me this trip.

The rain is timed perfectly; it kept us cool as we do the long climb out of the cenote in our 6 mil wetsuits, but it pretty much ended in time to start eating lunch and talk about the dives.

2:00pm Our second dive is planned to make the jump to the beginning of Paso del Lagarto line and keep going until one of us calls the dive, or until we reach a 'T' which probably means we reached Much's Maze. Into the cave we go. Beautiful! I hope I never get used to this, the spectacle of Sac Aktun always strikes me as if it were made of magic.

Neither of us have been this way before but the jump seemed kind of obvious on our previous dive. Glenn starts laying reel in the assumed direction but the beginning of the line is actually a slight dogleg to the right from our guess. No problem, plenty of tie-off opportunities and it follows all the protocols. At the beginning of the mainline there is a handwritten sign, one side in English the other side in Espanol stating that because of construction at Cenote Calimba, it is not advised for divers to go near there as the area may be unstable or impassable. I had read about this a few days before on the QRSS website but didn't think to mention it to Glenn before the dive. He was visibly concerned after reading the note but I conveyed to him it was okay and we should continue. We would be getting nowhere near Calimba, not with the amount of air we had.

This upstream passage is narrower, cozier, than Ho Tul. Formations are still regular, various, and everywhere. But the character of the passage changes more often and we come across areas where it is more honeycomb-like which may indicate where the underground river was more vigorous at the end of the ice age, etching its way through the limestone.

We go a long way following the guideline and have no indication of any turns, jumps, or side passages along the way. Just one round cookie with no writing on it in a place that made no sense. Maybe this was a turn-around point between Calimba and Gran Cenote? Dunno, but since it wasn't a directional marker and seemed to have no other meaning we just ignored it. The way ahead didn't change and we were clearly not entering sidemount territory.

About 500' later Glenn called the dive on 1/3rds, so, regretfully, back we go. No hassles, no trouble, no other dive teams pass us. Just plain good fun.

4:30pm Dive ended with 70 mins bottom time. Gear packed and stowed -- nothing stolen, good! Nothing left in the cave -- great!

6:10pm Back to Playa del Carmen, dropping off the tanks en route. Filling up our ATOS we are surprised when it takes only 10 liters! Total petrol cost = 68 pesos ($6.20). Another great advantage of the economy cars, best gas mileage.

6:30pm Checking back into Hertz, no hassles, no headaches. Total cost is the agreed $340 pesos which I gladly sign for. This is my 3rd time renting from this Hertz office and it won't be my last! They even drop us off near the ferry via their own shuttle at no additional charge, though I customarily tip the driver for this service. Excellent timing for the 7pm ferry.

7:00pm Lucked out on both trips, we got Ultramar ferries (MX $110 mas, para return de Cozumel) which are nicer and newer than the other brand. It may just be aesthetics, but the ride on Ultramar just seems smoother, more pleasant.


Next planned trip is Monday, 29 Jan 2007. Possible destinations are either Sistema Nohoch na Chich or the upstream cave of Dos Ojos, although Sistema Ox Bel Ha is possible if we can find information on it by Monday.


NB: On the day we dove Gran Cenote, 25 Jan 2007, it was decided and published that Sistema Sac Aktun is now the Longest Cave System in Quintana Roo, Mexico! I am very proud to have been diving here on the day when this important record was established.