Yeah!!! Eric’s January trip details are completed!!!
We are holding air, boats and space; so, join us for an escape from the cold to Cozumel. We will be staying again at Casa Mexicana, located in town, close to shopping, dining, and activities. We have a full diving schedule starting with a boat dive the day we arrive, then one day of three dives, two days of two tank diving with lunch on the boat each day. Opportunities to add additional afternoon or night dives as desired. Recreational equipment can be rinsed and stored at the dive shop. Breakfast buffet is included each morning.
This trip is open to recreational, technical and rebreather divers. For rebreather and technical divers, the run times for each dive will be two hours.
This trip promises to be a fun trip and a great time to escape the cold in Houston or wherever you live. Dive Mom is holding space so you need book onto the trip in a hurry becasue we have to release the air seats we are holding. You can find out more details about this fun trip to Cozumel by calling Ann or reviewing the detail trip sheet.
Caribbean
Escape the Winter Cold, Let’s Go Scuba Diving in January!
It is sometimes hard for me hard to believe that I used to be an avid skier. In college, I spent a number of weekends, a week around Christmas and Spring Break skiing. It was fun, exhilarating and challenging. My underwater camera saw more frozen moisture than liquid.
After mneung to Houston in…well let’s not go there…I changed from a skier to a sailor and a diver. White powdery slopes were replaced by soft sand beaches, boats, bikinis, dive equipment and clear blue water. Oh, and yes the warm weather.
Winters in Houston are a far cry from the cold wind-blown snow and ice of Lubbock, but I still find that winters can be cold. I guess I have just gotten used to the warmth so the mild winters here seem cold to me at times.
Despite the executives from Continental trading in their shorts and t-shirts for wool sweaters, wool pants and poly-propylene long underwear, Houston remains the gateway to the Caribbean and the soft sand and clear blue waters I discovered later in life. In the Caribbean there is plenty of warmth to go around and diving on some of the worlds most beautiful reefs. The walls stretch for miles down the coasts and in some places for miles down as well.
While Bing Crosby is singing “Let It Snow…” I am picturing a boat parked over a tropical reef, the top of the reef opening up eighty feet below me with the nearby wall plunging down 400 feet and the current guiding me along this natural aquarium. The fish are swimming, feasting in the current and the corals are gently swaying in the water.
The easiest place to go for a long weekend is Cozumel, Mexico a limestone island once home to the Mayan Oracle and a Mayan pilgrimage destination. Cortez removed the Oracle and used the island as a staging area for his conquest of Mexico.
Jacques Cousteau helped make the island a diving Mecca when he first visited the island in 1960. He found the sleepy little island a paradise above and below the water. Of course he probably would not recognize the Cozumel of today with 2 cruise ship terminals which can accommodate up to six ships. The current economic slowdown in the United States has thankfully reduced the number of ships visiting the island but unfortunately to the detriment to the local people.
Cozumel is the home of the second Marine Park founded in Mexico and is the first not to allow local fisherman to spear fish or line fish on the reefs. The primary industry in Cozumel is tourism with divers making up a large part of the tourist business, especially with the reduced cruise ship traffic.
The reefs, which took a beating in Hurricane Gilbert are still beautiful. The southern end of the island has steep walls and beautiful corals and fish, while the North end of the island was sloping walls and fast currents with up and down currents to boot. For rebreather divers especially, the areas without the up and down currents are more enjoyable and my favorite dives are in the vicinity of Palancar Gardens and Palancar Caves. It is really special to come up from the stark limestone depths into a garden of colour and lives, swirling around you as you swim in, out and around the pillars of coral. You float along, the currents carrying you along toward the north (generally) with the scene constantly changing and renewing the colour and life.
Hmm, I think I need to go diving! Luckily for me, the travel department at Oceanic Ventures, namely Ann, has put together a long weekend in Cozumel so I can complete some training for some students who are also looking forward to warm water and wetsuits instead of the cold water and dry suits I have been making them use for training up to this point. But, despite my being involved in a training class, there are a number of people who, like me, want to escape the cold and enjoy some warm tropical breezes.
If you can get away, you are welcome to join us in Mexico 13-17 January 2011. If you cannot make it this time, keep your head warm and remember someone else is staying warm for you.
Horns or Halo???
July 4th finds in Cozumel with 39 of our close, warm, personal friends. Ok, this included the three staff members who joined me on this holiday trip. Why so many staff members you might ask? Well, there are a number of reasons with the primary one being we don’t normally run large trips; but, when we do, we try and make them have the feel of our smaller more personal trips. So, despite the large number of divers, we had three boats and separate, local Dive Masters for each group. Of course we all met for lunch at the pier each day so we had the best of both worlds – lots of friends and a personal touch.
Of course, there were some clients who would have preferred a little less attention to their needs. Ashton Arsement, Brittan Clark and Stephanie Watawich were under the watchful eye of their Principals of Technical Diving Instructor – none other than our own Dave Snyder. Dave has a reputation of being a little devilish at times, so his students came up with a hand-sign for him during the dives. Dave was fortunate to have discovered this sign after Stephanie’s son Mathew visited at dinner and asked are you the Dave (with his hands on his head making horns) or are you “Dave” with a faraway dreamy or nice look (this would be Dave Sweeten).
Yes Stephanie saw the hand-sign starting but was too far away to have stopped the revelation. The cat was out of the bag and Dave Snyder had a new hand-sign for himself underwater. In fact, his wife Martha even started using in when she signaled to me asking “where is Dave.”
The diving was really nice despite some unusual currents. Harvey Sisco commented that looking up a wall in Cozumel from 300’ was really spectacular and he could see why we liked doing those dives on a wall. The wall itself at this depth was sparse but looking up at the coral heads, the fish and the surface way in the distance creates a lasting impression that carries you through the 90 minutes of decompression. Of course you do have the advantage of decompressing on the reef you were looking at from below, so it is a wonderful way to dive.
Stephanie celebrated a birthday with us and Brittan Clark, Morgan Hann, and Liz Kreiger all completed there 100th dive on this trip. Ashton, Brittan and Stephanie finished their Principals of Technical Diving Course and Harvey Sisco completed his CCR Trimix Course on during this trip. Congratulations everyone!
DIVAS, Diving, Rum and Wine
As the hurricane becomes more of a past event, a group of ladies joined Ann in Grand Cayman. Affectionately known as the Dive Diva group, these ladies left Houston in recovery and escaped the usual Houstonian question “so did you have any damage?” The plan was 5 days of diving with other activities including massages, reflexology, a rum tasting featuring Grand Cayman’s own Seven Fathoms Rum and of course one of Arie’s famous wine and cheese parties. Word from Grand Cayman is that the island will never be the same again!
It's All Over
It is now Saturday and Tek Week 2008 has drawn to a close. It started out a little tumultuous with Hurricane Gustov causing havoc in the Carribbean. But as the winds moved on into the Gulf, memories were being made in Grand Cayman.
My cadre of students finished their courses. Ray Turek completed his Normoxic Trimix course and may have been convinced that CCR was the only way to dive deeper because you could stay longer. Of course, he’ll now have to explain the need to his wife and then decide on which unit is right for him. He certainly got to see a variety of units here this week. Kim Smith from KISS rebreathers was here as was Peter Den Hann from Silent Diving Systems the North American distributer of the Evolution and Inspiration rebreathers. Paul Rainmaker, designer of the rEvo rebreather was here showing off his new rebreather. Then there were the divers themselves sporting a number of units including the Sentinel from VR technologies, several Inspirations, Evolutions, Evolution Plus’, an Optima, a Titan or two, a Megalodon, a few KISS Classics, a KISS Sport, and some rEvo’s.
While Ray was completing his Normoxic course, Madison Lee and Mark Nawman were working on their Trimix Course. They ended their training on Friday with a 300 foot dive near Dolphin Drop-Off in the west bay. All three of them received preliminary certificates at the closing session on Friday evening.
The training was a minor part of the week at least for me. The best part was the diving. Due to the winds from Gustov and Hanna, our diving was primarily off the West Bay portion of the island. Of course, this is not a real problem since these walls are beautiful and the aquatic life is abundant.
Diving deep in Grand Cayman is a real treat because not only are the deep portions of the walls beautiful, but your decompression is spent on the walls as well. This makes for a more entertaining stay and a more relaxed dive.
Coming up the coral canyons at Big tunnels treated us to more than 14 lobsters milling about and two chasing one another around the reef. In Orange Canyon and at both Leslie’s Curl and Dolphin drop off we were treated to exhibitions by the ultimate free-divers – the turtles. Rays and sharks greeted the divers on most dives and even the sharks made an appearance.
All in all it was a fun event and we had some great dives. The staff at Cobalt Coast and DiveTech work hard to make these events special and they succeeded once again.
See the press release at https://www.caymannetnews.com/news-9858–1-1—.html
Tek Week Update
Hurricane Gustov made the start of Tech Week in Grand Cayman a little interesting. We spent much of the week following the hurricane tracking maps and models on Weather Underground, www.wunderground.com, and talking to people down here.
Saturday morning found us going to the airport on faith that the Cayman government would open the island to non-residents by the time our flight left. I had spoken to Nat Robb early Saturday morning who indicated that this storm was more of a non-event for them (not true for the sister islands however). They had some wind and little rain.
Arie, the owner of Cobalt Coast, called me at 11:15 to tell me that the government on Grand Cayman had given the “all clear” and that visitors could now return to the island. Of course Continental had not received the message as quickly – the gate agent infomed me that “they were the airline” and it was up to them. However, the supervisors at Continental quickly cleared the flight for visitors with confirmed reservations (of course they wanted to see a printed confirmation…). After getting a number from Arie (just in case someone needed to confirm it with him) we were on our way.
Things were a little out of sorts and most of the windows on the island were boarded up as were some of the windows at Cobalt Coast and Dive Tech. The benches were pushed together and the dock was a little worse for wear. The most surprising thing was to see all of the Dive Tech cylinders in front of Cobalt Coast—lots of cylinders.
This morning the staff showed up and things were pulled out, moved swept and by lunch time you would never have known there was a storm except for the pier which by the end of the day was ¾ repaired – the only thing that stopped Jay and his crew was the fact that they ran out of wood and it was Sunday so getting more was not possible.
Nancy and the staff, pulled the boats out of the mangroves, cleaned them up, re-equipped them and toured possible dive sites by 12:00. By 1:00 we were diving on the North wall. The water heading out was a little green and the visibility at the dive site was not more than 60’ but we had a nice enjoyable dive, with Ray Turek completing his skills for his Normoxic Trimix course and Madison Lee learning more about free diving or breath-hold diving from Simon.
At last count 16 people canceled mostly because getting here at a different time or on a different day made it impossible. But, 33 participants still agreed to come and at least ½ of them were here by dinner time.
The seas should continue to lay down overnight and Nancy is predicting that shore diving off Cobalt will be available by tomorrow. Tomorrow’s dive plan calls for a 200 foot dive for Madison and Ray.
