Review: HeCloud Diving Flashlight

 I've had poor experiences with underwater flashlights in the past, and they've never survived more than a couple of trips. I knew I was going to need flashlights for the Puerto Rico trip because of the bioluminescence tour we wanted to go to. The HeCloud Diving lights came in a set of 2, and at $27 seemed worth the risk.

I was very impressed when I saw that the lights came not only with AAA battery holders, but also rechargeable lithium ion batteries that are custom fit for the flashlight. You can't carry those in checked baggage, so be careful! But having both meant that we could carry the lithium ion batteries in carry on, and also carry the AAA battery holders (preloaded) and not bother carrying the chargers.

The lights were bright, easy to use even for Boen, and robust --- we didn't have to be careful with them or baby them. We didn't actually dive with them, but they were also light. And if one flooded, we had a spare right away. I wish they hadn't bothered with the strobe feature, but in any case these were good lights and I can recommend them.

2017 Puerto Vallarta

We visited Puerto Vallarta over thanksgiving break.

This was Bowen's first chance to try his new Snorkel Mask and adjustable fins in open water. We got him a snorkel mask because he'd forgotten how to use a regular snorkel, and had bitten off the bite valve on the snorkel he had anyway, which meant that I'd have to buy a new device anyway. Snorkel masks are useless for diving since you can't equalize (can't pinch the nose through that hard plastic), but realistically, he wasn't going to dive deep enough to do that anyway. Unfortunately, the snorkeling wasn't actually all that great: compared to the Carribean, the water is murky, though there's plenty of wildlife, the cold water meant that Bowen got cold in about 15 minutes, and so missed the sightings of the giant manta rays that I got while diving.

We tried ziplining at the Los Veranos Zipline tour. Bowen liked it so much that we did it twice, once on Xiaoqin's birthday.

There were beautiful sunsets and lots of great food, but Boen got an unwanted souvenir: while sliding down the waterslide at a hotel he cut his chin on a decorative fake rock, so he ended up getting 2 stitches on his chin. But he's still able to eat ice cream and doesn't seem too distressed.

We spent lots of time in the swimming pool, and there, Bowen finally learned to duck dive in a swim suit! All in all, nice but not better than a sailing trip in the Carribean or cycling tour anywhere, but you knew I'd say that. I probably wouldn't repeat.

Review: Cressi Galileo

My go-to goggles for the last 3 years, the Aquasphere Kayenne, have basically had to be replaced every year or so. The failure mode is that the goggles' lenses fade or scratch, or become fogged up. When I looked at them, I realized that I'd seen similar patterns of failure before --- on Mazda Miata models that had a plastic rear window rather than glass.

At first, I thought that if I couldn't make these expensive goggles work, I could go ultra-cheap. Swedish-style goggles from swimoutlet.com only cost $3.50. But after I bought a pair I couldn't get them to not leak, no matter what. They also felt extremely uncomfortable, feeling as though they might pop my eyeballs out.

I noticed that my own diving/snorkeling masks are made out of tempered glass, and don't suffer from the fogging, so I set about looking for tempered glass goggles. To my surprise, an internet search revealed that there was only one model of tempered glass goggles: the Cressi Galileo. To add insult to injury, those cannot be purchased on Amazon.com, and I had to import them from Amazon.co.uk instead, costing about $30 after shipping fees.

When I received them, I was dismayed --- they were definitely sized big, and they were heavy. I tightened the strap all the way and managed to get a secure fit. Then they fogged up in the swimming pool. That's actually not a problem, since because these are tempered glass, you can apply toothpaste to the lenses and then they'll never fog again. That's what I did, and indeed, it worked. These are the clearest lenses you'll ever get, and again, because they're tempered glass, the UV will never fog them.

They're heavier than standard plastic-lensed swimming goggles. But so what? They're more comfortable (the skirt around them are more like those used for diving masks than goggles), they'll probably slow me down in the water by a couple of seconds each lap, but I'm not winning any prizes for swimming anyway. What's more important, they can serve as a backup to my diving mask for snorkeling. They aren't a real backup for diving, since diving masks need to cover the nose so you can equalize pressure under water.

9 Dives that I recommend

My recent trip reminded me that I should list the best dives I've done. I'm not an avid diver, but I've been blessed with having done a bunch of great dives, to the extent that "normal" dives don't feel worth it any more. In order of appearance in my log book:

1. Fredriksted Pier Dive. A fun, easy dive, that's got lots to see, despite being a pier dive. A great "post-certification" dive.
2. The Wreck Of the Rhone. A classic, gorgeous wreck, which is so old it's basically an artificial reef. Enjoyable with clear water and lots of history and things to do. Recommend that you do this the first time as a guided dive.
3. Steve's Bommie. Easily my favorite dive in the Great Barrier Reef. Schools and schools of fish. Just unbeatable.
4. Exmouth Navy Pier. Like diving in an aquarium. I never saw so many sharks in such a small place.
5. Cathedral in Bequia. Easily the best drift dive I've ever done. Stunning wildlife.
6. Felipe Xiotencatl. A still largely intact ship with lots of swim throughs. You get to even sit on a still working commode.
7. Chac Mool Scuba diving in a cavern. Stalactites, stalagmites. Floating through thermoclines. Spelunking without getting dirty. A heck of a lot of fun. People die doing these things, so go with a guide who knows what they're doing.
8. The Indians. A beautiful shallow dive that's gorgeous in the morning. Swim throughs and all sorts of delights. Worth repeating.
9. Manta Ray Night Dive. Worth a trip to Kona for. Enough said.

Of the lot, I'd say that Ningaloo Reef is easily the most over-looked dive area. The snorkeling there is also fantastic, with drift snorkeling being one possibility. Watch out for sun burn though!

Having said all this, if I never dove again I wouldn't mind that much. For me, it's mostly something I do opportunistically (i.e., if I happen to be in the tropics with good diving). I wouldn't go out of my way to plan another dive-oriented trip again.

April 3rd: The Wreck of the Rhone & Cistern Point

We woke up in the morning and immediately got to work loading up the dinghy with dive tanks. Tony was not very clear as to how we were going to dive today, and had mentioned that we might want to refill our dive tanks ourselves since he might show up and use our own boat to take us diving. Shauna had failed to get DAN's dive insurance the night before, and so she wanted to make that happen as well.

At 8:00am, folks were already ashore but the dive shop was not opened, so I called the shop and the employee said she was on the way. Horizon also called me to say that they had not received the WiFi unit, so I ended up on the phone making calls to Tony's wife and Horizon to ensure that everything would come together.

It took until nearly 10:00am for Tony to show up, but when he did, it was on the sailing catamaran/dive boat, the Braveheart. The Braveheart was a luxury dive catamaran that made The Escape looked like a toy (though at charter rates of $19500/week for 8 people, it had better be). It had two compressors on board, a big dive platform, a water maker, and ample room: even the heads had transparent bottoms so you could look down at the fish while taking a shower.

From Escape Catamaran 2012

The wreck of the Rhone is a world class dive, and even though this was my second time, I still enjoyed it thoroughly. It's an old wreck, so it's encrusted with wildlife, and lots of pretty things to see. It was so good that after snorkeling above us for a bit, XiaoQin decided to try diving one more time.

From BVI 2012

During the surface interval, a false alarm led us to believe there would be whales for us to see, and we all got into the dinghy to look for it, but it didn't happen. So we were taken to Salt Island to have a look at the salt pond instead. It was warm once out of the water, but it was interesting to look at the island. The best thing about the Braveheart is that with 2 tenders, surface intervals will never be boring.

From BVI 2012

The second dive was even more fun, since we were all pretty good about using relatively little air, it was agreed that we could do the Rhone and the Rhone Reef.

From BVI 2012

I'd forgotten how pretty it was, and XiaoQin had a great time as well. We even saw a shark but I didn't have my camera ready for it so it went. I did, however, get a decent video of a turtle swimming.

From BVI 2012

We found a specimen of a Lion fish, an invasive species in the Caribbean, and our guide speared it, bringing it back to the Braveheart for a decapitation.

From BVI 2012

Soon enough, the dive was over, and we were delivered back to Escape with 2 fresh tanks replacing tanks that were previously known to be low but which we had not bothered to refill because they weren't low enough to justify the money.

We then proceeded to dive Cistern Point, which turned out to be more interesting as a dive than a snorkel. Once the coral was up close, we could see plenty of life in the area. Arturo even found a souvenir: a ring with a cork tied to it via a ribbon.

From BVI 2012

The nice thing about shallow dives is that they are quite long. We got 60 minutes out of our tanks. Unfortunately, John hurt himself while getting into a dinghy, rendering his hand out of action.

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April 2nd: The Bight (Norman Island) to Manchioneel Bay (Cooper Island)

From Screen Captures

I got up at 6am only to find that Arturo was also up, along with Shauna. This would set the pattern for the entire trip: the 3 of us were morning people and well suited to getting the boat moving and underway. The morning's motoring was a short distance, less than a nautical mile to get to the Indians, where the mooring buoys would be in high demand (no anchoring allowed because of the coral), but no overnight moorings were permitted.

From BVI 2012

I last tried diving the Indians the last time I was here, but I had a very confused dive master who got lost during the dive and so we never saw any of the swim-throughs that were listed in the book. This time, I suggested that we snorkel around the area to sort through navigation issues. Arturo agreed, but Amy and John were impatient to get underwater and so jumped in straight away with scuba gear. Since Arturo had many more dives than I did, it was naturally assumed that he would lead the dive.

From BVI 2012

Snorkeling in the morning is amazingly great, since the water is still calm and the crystal clear water granted us clear views of the coral near us. We snorkeled for a half hour before donning wet suits and diving in. Arturo after his initial snorkel, said I must have had an idiot for a dive master last time because the navigation would be straightforward.

From BVI 2012

Through to his word, we did the entire dive with no problems, and had no issues finding the divethroughs. The dive was very shallow which meant that we had a nice long dive, without any panic whatsoever about running out of air. Or we would have, had we not noticed that Tony's equipment leaked like a sieve.

From BVI 2012

The dive took so long that by the time we were all sorted out it was 11:00am. Given that Cooper Island's mooring balls were known to fill up some times at 2:00pm, I decided to be extra conservative and start sailing there right away, eschewing a second dive. I reasoned that there were plenty of dive opportunities around Cooper Island anyway.

From BVI 2012

Indeed, by the time we got to Cooper Island's Manchioneel Bay it was quite clear that there was a race going on. There were about 3 mooring buoys left, and there were about 3 sail boats coming in. We watched as one boat after another beat us to the mooring buoys (their skippers much more willing to push their engines than I was), and we headed for the last mooring buoy only to find that it was red. Fortunately, one more buoy at the edge of the bay was open. We took it without drama, and settled down to enjoy the afternoon, still quite disbelieving of the fact that we had a mooring buoy race at 1:30pm!

The others wanted to dive the wreck of the Maria L, but I wasn't terribly interested, having seen the pictures of the wreck from the book, and elected to snorkel Cistern point with XiaoQin instead. We did the snorkel, which was pretty but none too special as it looked like the coral was too far to get a close look without scuba tanks.

We got back to the boat and found the folks were driving back with the dinghy as they could not find the location of the dive site. Shauna and Amy had decided to go ashore with the dinghy. Fortunately, I had pre-programmed the dive sites into my GPS, and handing it to Arturo, was confident that they would be able to do find it this time, especially now that we realized that we had had South and North confused.

There was still plenty of time to swim around, so we swam to the beaches that were marked private as seen from shore. Throughout the BVIs, the beaches up to the high tide line are always public, so you can safely ignore any signs about the privacy of beaches. Indeed, as we got there, two women were dropped off by a dinghy from another yacht and started collecting shells.

From BVI 2012

We had a crisis with the wifi unit. It wasn't working the previous night, and John and Arturo suspected that others were hopping onto our router. They had performed a hard reset, which rendered it useless. A call to the office revealed that (1) the network was simply down last night, and (2) the reset wiped the password for logging on from the unit, and (3) they couldn't give us the password over the phone because the same password was used for all the units. So we had to return the unit back to Horizon and then they'd find a way to get it back to us. A chase boat would cost $150, and there was no easy way to get the unit back to Horizon without sailing back to Nanny Cay, something I was loath to do. While I was at it, Horizon talked us into debugging and fixing the shower sump in the starboard head, which was not draining the shower of water.

The folks came back from their dive and said the coincidentally, Tony was diving at the same site! I called Tony and asked if he could get the unit delivered to Horizon and he agreed, so Arturo jumped back into the dinghy and drove back to the site.

Dursk came early, disappearing behind the clouds and robbing us of a sunset. Nevertheless, having solved all the problems to day, I could not complain and looked forward to diving the wreck of the Rhone again the next day.
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March 29-31st: Prologue

XiaoQin and I flew on Jet Blue from San Francisco to Fort Lauderdale, then to San Juan, where a 20 minute flight took us to St. Thomas. We arrived at 3:00pm, which was cutting it close to make it to the ferry, so spent the night at the Island View Guest House instead. Set on a hill side, it granted us a beautiful view of Charlotte Amalie and the surroundings.

From BVI 2012

The next day, we caught the first ferry and then taxi'd over to the Serendipity House, where we took a rest before getting picked up at 1:00pm by Tony, the owner of UBS Dive Center, where we tried out dive gear, which we would be renting.

From BVI 2012

Tony had a set back: his boat's twin engines had caught on fire a few nights before, melting bits of the hull along with it, so he wasn't going to be able to give us dive instruction as promised. He foisted us over to Paradise Watersports instead. Unfortunately, the attitude of the instructor didn't go over well with XiaoQin, so she bailed on the instruction.

From BVI 2012

We spent the next day swimming and relaxing on the beach instead, and Arturo Crespo and Cindy Zhou joined us.

Arturo had just spent 2 days at St. John's Virgin Islands National Park, and declared it to be excellent. "The BVI had better be spectacular to top that!" Arturo is well-traveled and a man for all seasons, but I felt surprisingly un-intimidated. My last visit to the British Virgin Islands had haunted me since, and I kept trying to make this trip happen. Having moor'd at Cinnamon Bay and spent a morning there, I deliberately started our charter in Tortola to avoid crossing borders so we could spend the most time in what I considered the fun parts of the virgin islands.
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Sailing and Diving St. Vincent and the Grenadines

This is the index page for our recent sailing and diving trip through St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Unlike other sailing trips, I learned about this through an article in the New York Times about the Illusion.

Pictures

St. Vincent and the Grenadines

Alena's Pictures

Trip Report

• December 15th, 2009: Prologue
• December 16th, 2009: Rodney Bay to Marigot Bay
• December 17th, 2009: Marigot Bay to Rodney Bay
• December 18th, 2009: Rodney Bay
• December 19th, 2009: Rodney Bay to Bequia
• December 20th, 2009: Bequia
• December 21st, 2009: Port Elizabeth to Wallilabou Bay
• December 22nd, 2009: La Soufiere
• December 23rd, 2009: Wallilabou Bay
• December 24th, 2009: Wallilabou Bay
• Christmas Day
• December 26th, 2009: Wallilabou Bay to Young Island
• December 27th, 2009: Young Island
• December 28th, 2009: Young Island to Canouan
• December 29th, 2009: Canouan to Union Island
• December 30th, 2009: Union Island to Bequia
• New Year's Eve
• New Year's Day
• Epilogue
• Conclusions
• Appendix: Equipment Reviews

Wallilabou Bay to Young Island

Wallilabou Bay is infested with mosquitoes. In general, Caribbean mosquitoes aren't bad, but Lisa had so many bites that her legs were pock-marked with mosquito bites. The bay was particularly bad because the Illusion was moored stern into the wind, which meant that there was no breeze flowing through that boat. But at least we now had the entire boat filled with water.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

Norman wanted to leave at 11am, but Alena, Josh and Noah wanted to wait till at least Noon, because they had wanted to take a shower, and use the internet at Steve's. Despite Norman's assurances that our travel dates were OK, it turned out that January 2nd was not a good date to fly out of St. Lucia—the customs office would be closed until 9am, and our flight left at 8:40am. This meant that we would have to depart the Illusion on January 1st, take the ferry from Bequia to St. Vincent, and then fly from St. Vincent back to St. Lucia so that Norman could discharge us from Bequia on the 31st. So we had to book an extra flight as well as a hotel room. Alena was in the same situation, so we bought our plane tickets and booked hotel rooms together.

At 10:00am, I saw that we had at least two hours, so I jumped into the water and swam out to the arch and back again. It was a surprisingly long swim, despite the relatively quiescent current. By the time I finish, it felt like I had a really good work-out. I had half an hour to dry off and change before everyone else came back and we got the boat ready to go. I was put on the helm, and skiff line got undone and replaced, and then Ron pulled the mooring line off. Unfortunately, when I put the engine into gear to move off our mooring position, the engine didn't engage. None of us noticed at first, but after a while when we saw the shore getting closer it became obvious what had happened. Norman ran down into the engine room, and came back up a bit later, declaring that the shearing pin attaching the engine to the propellor had sheared off. Apparently, the boat was designed for there to be a loose coupling between the engine and the propellor, so that fouling the propellor wouldn't damage the engine (or the propellor). However, during a recent incident, the loose coupling broke, and Norman did not have a replacement handy, so made do with a rigid coupling. As a result, you had to baby the throttle and the gear shift, and even then once in a while, even shifting gears could shear off the pin!

Well, with the main engine disabled, Norman jumped into the skiff and to start it so he could at least tow the Illusion back into deeper water. When he tried to start the motor, however, the choke came off in his hand! At this point, there was a crowd gathering on the shore to watch the spectacle as the Illusion edge closer and closer to the beach. I felt the rudder go stiff in my hand as it dug into the sand on the beach. Tony and a few sailors from another boat came up to the Illusion and tried to push it back off the sand, but with a 20 ton boat, a few hands just wasn't enough to move it. I saw Norman rip off the cover on the skiff's outboard motor and start taking the engine apart to try to cajole it into working. It took him an agonizing 5 minutes, but he eventually got it started, and he then drove up to the bow to pick up a towline and started towing the Illusion into deeper water.

At first progress was slow and unapparent, but a few pushes from folks ashore helped it along, and soon the Illusion was headed into deeper water—but with another boat in the way. I felt a moment of error as the wheel wouldn't respond to my efforts as the rudder was still in the sandbar, but after a bit I felt the rudder free up from the sand and I turned the Illusion away from the other vessel and into the middle of the bay, where the anchor was dropped. The relief on everyone's face was apparent, but that didn't last long, as Norman was livid when he came back on board.

"You're supposed to check that the engine engages before coming off the mooring!" he shouted at Allison. "That wasn't on the check list?" "Yes it is, but you weren't looking at it!" It turned out not to be on the crew's check list, and I do remember checking it routinely when I sailed other vessels, but if you ask me this sort of thing is the skipper's responsibility, not that of the crew.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

We turned off the Illusion's main engine, and Norman worked on it while the rest of us cooled our heels and relieved the exciting moments. Norman knows every piece of the boat well, including the engine, so it didn't take him 30 minutes to replace the sheering pin, and we were off again. After all that excitement, the sail down into Young Island was unexciting, taking only 90 minutes with the engine at a fairly slow speed. We pulled into the Young Island area around 4pm, dropping anchor close to the shore but further away from the dock. Lisa and I got our dive gear ready, and were dropped off at the jetty along with several others, but while they would return to the Illusion at 5:30pm, we would do the dive and then be dropped off at the Illusion by the Dive St. Vincent folks. Since Allison would be joining us for the night dive, she would be dropped off as the others were picked up.

From St. Vincent and the Grenadines

We walked over to the dive shop, and got everything ready for the dive. By the time 5:30 rolled around, we were on the jetty waiting for the night dive to start. We saw Norman drop off Allison and pick up the rest of the crew at a jetty not far from where we were, but on the return, the skiff had its outboard out of the water and folks were out rowing. We asked Allison as she came up what was going on, and she said that the outboard had gone out. She made the comment that she didn't think that they were going to do the charter on the 15th after all, as the boat was simply not reliable enough.

The night dive was on a site close to Young Island known as Critter Junior. We were each given a flash light by Calli, and went into the water for a fairly long, 50 minute dive at shallow depth. Night scenes are completely different from day scenes—lobsters, which are usually hiding in crevices at night are out in full force, and we saw large lobsters roaming about scavenging in the open. We also saw many shrimp, and lots of other creatures that I can't remember. Allison had been a little nervous about doing the night dive (it was her first one), but once in the water she was completely comfortable and had no issues at all.

Despite the wet suit, however, I got cold somewhere around 45 minutes, and wasn't unhappy when the time was up and we returned to the dive boat and the Illusion, where the crew had kept some spaghetti for us. We met our newest crew member, Mary from New York, and went to bed worn out after all the excitement of the day.

Wallilabou Bay

Apparently, the day before, a new boat had arrived, which forced Norman to switching mooring buoys. Norman wasn't very happy about it, because he had laid down the mooring buoy himself. Nevertheless, the Illusion was moved and everyone was happy. However, during the night the mooring broke loose, so the boat next to us drifted towards the rocks on the north end of the bay. Everyone on the boat had awakened upon hearing the shouts except Lisa and I! Apparently, it was very exciting with lots of pulling and shouting, but it turned out that there were railroad tracks underneath that boat, and they had just gotten stuck on them. A little bit of throttle and they were free. They sailed off and we never saw them again.

We left early this morning, since we had to do a taxi transfer and make it to the dive shop at 9:30am. It took us longer to get picked up this time, so it was a good thing we left extra time, but now that I knew where the two bus terminals were, and how they worked (one was for local rides, the other for long distance rides), we had no problem with the transfer, which had taken a whole hour the day before.

Today's Divemaster was DJ, a quiet St. Vincent native. Dive 3 was at New Guinea Reef, and I learned to be really comfortable there, and took the best picture of a Moray Eel that I had taken the entire trip. A barracuda was spotted, and I also saw some jelly fish and got a good picture of them.

Dive 4 was at Turtle Reef, where I spotted some Sphagetti Eel and had 100' of visibility. This was ideal diving, warm water, no current, and lots and lots of wildlife. DJ mentioned that a night dive was planned for December 26th, and we committed there and then to do it. In fact, since I knew we wouldn't be leaving until the 28th, I committed us to a 5 dive package.

We ate lunch, and then took the bus downtown where it took me about 25 minutes to find an ATM that would take my american ATM card and give me money. Then we got back to Wallilabou bay, but upon arriving discovered that Lisa had stuck the camera into her pocket and it had fallen right out of it during the bus ride, so we lost 2 days worth of pictures, including the ones that I was making just as I was getting comfortable with shooting underwater! I was so bummed that I ordered a beer at Steve's to the sound of Ron saying, "I can't believe Piaw is drinking alcohol!"

I did pass on Dive St. Vincent's snorkel trip information: they ran a trip to the Falls of Baleine in the north of St. Vincent, and a second snorkel site, with all day rum punch for US$60 a head. The price was too steep for everyone there, so they passed. Allison, however, was interested in doing the night dive with us, since she had never done one before.

Wallilabou Bay

We woke up early in the morning, as Sarang, Norman, Alena, and Allison were headed over to the airport. Sarang had to return to Utah today, Alena needed to get her baggage, Norman and Allison had to deal with business and provisions. We all said our goodbyes to Sarang, had breakfast, and then Lisa and I left at 8:30 to catch a bus to Buccament bay while Sue, Ron, Josh, and Noah stayed in the area.

It turned out to be a 10 minute walk to the bus stop, but busses being the way they are on St. Vincent, we had gotten only three-quarters of the way there before a bus stopped to pick us up. It turns out that busses on St. Vincent are all privately run: they are owned by the driver, who also typically has a conductor who's job it is to not just collect money, but also to solicit customers and pack passengers into the bus like sardines!

The drive along the coast to Buccament bay was beautiful, especially since the bus wasn't crowded and full. When we walked out to the coast, though, I realized that we were on the wrong side of a big river between us and the jetty where we were to be picked up. A quick call to the dive shop confirmed this, and we had to walk back out to the main road, and make a right into the village through an open field and then along the stream. However, the road then turned across the stream again in a little bit.

We stopped and talked to a local, and he showed us a place to hop across the stream on boulders, and then we followed his directions past a hotel under construction before getting onto the jetty. The entire ordeal took a good half an hour, and I was glad that I was paranoid enough to start the day very early. In 15 minutes the Dive St. Vincent boat showed up and we were helped onto the Dive boat by the dive master, Calli. There was another person diving with us that day, and unlike us, he had paid for a full-on dive package, complete with a land resort.

Calli was a big St. Vincent native, and he handled the speedboat with ease, pulling us seemingly just around the corner, and then single-handedly picking up the mooring buoy with ease and tying the boat down. He then dragged out all the equipment, fitted Lisa's gear to the dive tank, and then got us all ready to dive.

Our first dive was known as The Wall, which was a coral wall that extended deep into the Bay. We dived down and followed the dive master almost immediately down to 92 feet. Calli was an incredibly good Divemaster, pointing out sights and wildlife constantly, and identifying anything we needed. We even spotted the rare golden hamlet, and he found us a sea horse with its tail wrapped around some coral. The water clarity was amazing, and our eyes were almost poping out of our masks by the time we were then. I decided there and then that we would do as much diving here on St. Vincent as possible.

Our second dive was at Pinnacle Rock. The sun lit up the shallow water, giving us dappled looks under water as we explored. It was a beautiful dive, and we decided that we would sign up for more dives the next day.

Calli told us that it was easier for us to get a taxi back from Kingstown, so we were driven back to the dive shop. We used the showers at the dive shop and left Lisa's dive gear at the shop since we were going to be diving again tomorrow, then had lunch at Xcape almost right next to the dive shop on the beach facing Young Island.

After that, we took the taxi into Kingstown, where we wandered around looking for the supermarket for snacks for the surface intervals. After that, we hopped onto the taxi back to Wallilabou Bay, and then pulled ourselves across to the Illusion from shore. We had no sooner stepped on board, however, than have Norman come up onto deck and holler at us. "You're too early! You can only come back after 5:30pm! You can tell the others that too. I'm working on the boat all day and can't have you folks underfoot!"

So we had to leave the boat and visit Steve's where Ron, Sue, Josh, and Noah were also waiting out the skipper. Apparently, Norman and Allison had committed to doing a charter in the middle of January, and all that renovation was happening to put more guests onto the boat over the next few days as well as for the charter customers. We asked the others about their day, and they said that they went to Kingstown and explored and shopped, but had to endure a taxi ride with 22 people on board!

We took showers at Steve's, and lounged around. Someone at Steve's saw my Vibram Five Fingers and offered to buy them off my feet, but he had feet that were the wrong size for my shoes.

The night was spent discussing plans: the others were going to snorkel and explore the waterfall within walking distance. Norman said that we would only move to Young Island on the 26th, and we would actually spend 2 nights there, which gave us lots of time for diving. I was asked to investigate if the dive shop would do snorkelling trips as well.

Exmouth, Australia

The flight to Exmouth went off uneventfully, despite a 5:40am Taxi pick up and flight attendants that were quite intrigued by the Kindle. We originally planned not to have a car in Exmouth, but the airport pickup shuttle person told us that having a car was a must, so we stopped off in town to rent a stick-shift car for $50/day.

Getting into the Best Western, we discovered that it was right in the middle of the former U.S. Naval base! The owner, Axel, was a German transplant who had lived in Exmouth for 15 years with his wife and kids, and eagerly set us up in a nice room that looked like great value (full kitchen, full size refrigerator, etc.). He then gave us an orientation of the area, lent us an ice box, an umbrella, and rented us snorkels and masks.

We then headed to town for lunch and a visit to the shopping center to fill the ice box, and then drove to Turquoise Bay to try the drift snorkel. The beach is filled with pieces of coral skeletons, just to show you how robust this coral reef is. The drift snorkel is set in a lagoon with a consistent current from South to North. You enter through the South, and the current carries you to the North, the only catch being that if you forget to leave the lagoon before it carries you past the Southern sandbar, a powerful rip-tide will send you right into the Indian Ocean, where there's no landfall between Australia and Africa!

We snorkeled cautiously, and it was a lot of fun --- I even saw a reef shark moving around in the water. Then while preparing for another entry, I saw another snorkeler doing something very smart --- she put on her fins and stepped backwards towards the reef, and by the time she was forced to swim, she was almost right on the reef, and didn't have to fight the current at all. I followed suit and had a great time.

In fact, we had too great a time, since after we were done it was 4pm, and we were feeling a little sun exposed. We drove South to Sandy Bay, which was a pretty place, and then back North to Mandu-Mandu gorge, which was a walk up to the highest place in the park for a good view of the entire Ningaloo Reef. I started the walk, but found the going tough, not because of elevation gain, but because the trail was right on a stream bed which was rocky and painful to walk on. After a while I started looking for short cuts. I found a rock climbing ascent, but on examination discovered that I just wasn't good enough to do it. A little while later, I backtracked and found a chimney. I'd read about how to do this in The Freedom of the Hills about 10 years back, but never had a chance to apply it, and so took the chance to do so. What do you know, it worked like a charm.

Once at the summit, I took a few pictures, and walked back down, and on the return, discovered to my chagrin that if I had only been more patient I would have found the non-mountaineering ascent. C'est la vie. Lisa then wanted to look for turtle hatchlings, while I wanted to see the sunset from the local lighthouse. Fortunately, the two attractions were right next to each other and so we could each do so. I found the sunset disappointing, however, and Lisa found no turtle hatchlings.

We had dinner at Whalers in town, and the food was found to be absolutely top-notch, right up there with the best I had at Google, while the service was slow but acceptable.

The next morning, we were picked up at 7:40 for the Navy Pier Dive, billed as one of the top 10 dives in the world. The U.S. Navy built a submarine communications system that consisted of really high towers (the tallest is taller than the Eiffel, but doesn't look that tall because we had nothing to compare it to), and ran a base in Exmouth in the 1960s. Since then, most of the work has been automated away, except for the pier, which is used to deliver diesel to operate the system.

The dive itself was quite amazing --- you really do feel like you're in an aquarium, surrounded by fish. We saw Rays, Sharks (multiple of them!), Lion fish (also multiple), Potato Cods (big huge ones), schools of Barracuda, the list goes on. The visibility was not great (20 feet at most), but the density of wild life was quite impressive. If you're in the area, this dive is definitely a must do.

We returned to the hotel at noon, went to town to have lunch at Grace's Tavern (surprisingly good food), and then I went snorkeling again while Lisa stayed at the hotel. By the time I returned, it was almost time to return the car, so we did so and had dinner at Pinnochio's, an Italian establishment that was disappointing.

The dive on Saturday was changed on account of the wind --- it was way too strong to go to the Murions, so we were sent to the West Coast instead. We dived two dives and did a snorkel in between, but I wasn't too happy with the dive guides this time. The reason is the Ningaloo Reef Dreaming also trains Dive Masters (known as Dive Control Specialists in the SSI lingo). In this case, the number of trainee Dive Masters outnumbered the paying customers (this is because Ningaloo trains you for free if you work for them as an intern for 4 weeks after your Dive Master course), and I did not appreciate being used as a guinea pig for trainees during a dive I'm paying for. The first dive felt like a race, with the trainees shooting off like a rocket, and us paying customers chasing them. The second one was considerably better, with better wild life viewing, but with all the switching arounds and confusion, I would have preferred getting an experienced guide. If you're signed up for a trip with these guys, I recommend making sure you get a real dive guide, not an intern or a trainee!

By the time the diving was over it was nearly 4pm, so we chilled in the hotel room and did a BBQ for dinner.

The big disappointment this morning was that our whale shark spotting trip had been cancelled, again due to wind. We salvaged the day by renting a car, and going snorkeling again, first at South Mandu (which Lisa loved), a site where the coral is practically at your nose, granting great visibility but few large fish, and then we had lunch at the Yardie River. We finished up the day at Turquoise Bay again, but on the non-drift loop, where we saw a small Manta Ray, and I spotted a clown fish --- but the drift loop really is better. Dinner was at Whalers again, as we tried to drown away our sorrow at not seeing Whale Sharks with good food.

Diver Dan's Beginning Open Water

I just recently finished my first beginning open water class this past weekend. I decided to get certified to dive the moment I was notified that I was going to Australia for business (and thus could take 2 weeks off to explore the great down under and dive the Great Barrier Reef...).

Due to short notice, I had very few choices of classes, but decided to pick one that was certified by PADI and had the 5 star rating.

So I picked Diver Dan's dive shop to go get certified. I also decided to pick the weeknight format as it meant giving up less weekends (ski season beckons!). So instead of two weekends in a row, I got to go to 3 weeks of 2 weeknights each (3 class room sessions, 3 pool sessions, each 3 hours long), and the standard 2 weekend dives (2 dives a day).

It was probably great luck that we ended up with an absolutely great instructor. In our very first class, Todd basically told us that he runs his scuba class very different from other instructors. True to his word, he doesn't.

His methods of classroom instruction is probably one of the best I've seen for subjects involving mostly hands-on learning. Instead of going over the book during the class, he would just give us a ton of anecdotes (he has over 3000 dives under his belt), and each of his anecdotes would relate to the topic that we were supposed to cover in class. As an example, the first class we were in supposedly talks about equipment. Masks, fins, Buoyancy Control Devices (BCDs), etc. He went through most of the non-important equipment...masks, gloves, wetsuits....and then when he got to the BCD, would go off on stories about why most BCDs suck, and why we should get backplates with bladders if we decided to get serious into diving. It was both funny and informative as he would go into quite a number of details about the failures of BCDs and that their one advantage is that they're cheap. And how all divers pay for that cheapness.

His pool sessions were equally as informative as he told us very early on the basics of diving and that he would spend most of our time in the pool teaching us the basics, and making sure we were as fundamentally sound as he could make us in the very short time he had with us. Basically in diving, there's only 3 things that matter, buoyancy control, trim, and kick. He informed us that the only thing we really had time for, and probably the most important to us, was buoyancy. Instead of overweighting us in the pool (and thus making our decents easier, but making us pay to stay buoyant by kicking to maintain some semblance of neutral buoyancy. kicking to stay buoyant is bad, wastes air), he would make sure we were properly weighted and thus have to learn to stay buoyant using breath control. We must have spent about 4 of the 9 hours in the pool doing nothing but breath control to gain control of our buoyancy. The other times were spent doing proper ascent and descents.

Oh we spent some time blazing through the other skills as well, partial flood clear, full mask clear, manual inflation, but as we did each skill, he would tell us the practicality of each (buddy sharing a regulator usually ends up with two dead buddies is one of his favourite stories), and go over them very very quickly, occasionally stopping to tell us why we were blazing through some of the lessons.

His ocean dives was also quite excellent...instead of starting us off at an easy dive spot, he gave us a pretty brutal location....having to haul 40 extra lbs of gear down 20 or so steps of stairs into rocky terrain and then into heavy surf is probably not most people's idea of an easy dive spot.

I've heard many times that learning to dive in Monterey is one of the best places to learn to dive, not only because Monterey is a fairly decent dive spot, but because the cold water trains you to be a better diver (less margin of error, the cold makes your brain work slower, forcing you to think faster), and I can say its pretty true. Even though my first few dives were quite good (water was 52 degrees, quite warm for Monterey!), the last two dives were absolutely frigid (water was probably 42 to 48 degrees), even with 8 millimeter wetsuits, you were never really warm, and having to do the same skills in frigid water is kind of the ultimate final exam. =)

In the end, when Todd handed us our PADI certifications, I really did feel a sense of accomplishment and felt that I could dive confidently AND enjoy my dives (less fear, less brain-dead moments like "uh what do i do now.."). I have to say that Todd has a lot to do with it as SCUBA is pretty much a hands-on skill, and his ability to relate his stories with the class room material was incredibly useful in showing the class how the class room material isn't just mostly fluff.

One thing I have to recommend to people is that if you're not in a huge rush, take the weeknight classes. You have less people (I had 5 in the class, typical weekend class is 8), which means once you're out in the ocean, you get a lot more instructor time...and try to get into a class with Todd. I guarantee you won't regret it. =)



Next up for me! Great Barrier Reef Diving!