SCUBA Certified, that is!

This week has been spent under the water for Marianna and I. Pool work and four Open Water Dives as well as a final test have completed our YMCA SCUBA course!

We are SCUBA Divers now!!!



Do you want the details? 'Cause I'd love to share them!

DIVE #1
Our first dive was in the afternoon on the Benwood Wreck. The ride out aboard the Ocean Diver dive boat was lovely, the seas calm and the skies sunny, as we say down here - a Chamber of Commerce day. Marianna and I suited up and stepped off the back of the boat into the 86 degree water with visibility that was about 35 - 40 feet. We swam over to a nice sandy patch and settled down to demonstrate things like flooding and clearing our masks and buddy breathing.

We then took off to do a bit of exploring! The Benwood was a Norwegian merchant marine freighter that sank in 1942 after colliding with a tanker, the Robert C. Tuttle. Both ships were running "lights out" to avoid German U-Boats during WWII and while they did avoid the Germans, they did not avoid each other!

The ship is now mostly flattened out upon the bottom with very interesting little holes you can peep down into that the fish love to hide in and a nice rib structure that is visible. Our deepest depth on this dive was 37 feet and we stayed on the bottom for 47 delightful minutes.

Dive #2
We then moved on over to French Reef and stopped at the Christmas Tree Cave dive site. This site has neat Coral "Swim-Throughs" and canyon-like formations to wind your way through. The name Christmas Tree Cave does not come from the Christmas Tree Worm, my first guess, but rather from the highest coral formation at the site which is cone , or shall we say, Christmas Tree, in shape!

This is a spectacular site with tons of cool areas to explore. The canyon-like channels are rather challenging to swim through as none are wider than your arm span and many are tighter than that. We were able to visit one "swim-through" which was long enough to be considered a cavern. It was coated with cool fish exhibiting a bit of Bioluminescence in the darker waters of the cavernous "swim-through". Our depth on this dive was 40 feet and we were down for 52 minutes in water with 40 easy feet of visibility.

Dive #3
Our third dive was a morning dive from the Santana dive boat. As we left the dock a broken rainbow appeared in the sky. There had been heavy downpours at dawn and most of the people on the manifest cancelled due to the rain which we thought had moved further south.

As we cleared Crash Corner and exited the canal however, we could see very dark clouds about and our captain, Craig, made the call to transfer our dives from our expected locations back to the Benwood and French Reef.

I actually really enjoyed returning to the Benwood and seeing it a second time. We moved over to a neat sandy patch with a colony of Yellow-headed Gobies at 50 feet, our deepest depth for this dive. Gobies are fun to watch as they emerge from their holes and slip quickly back in, tail first. After 40 minutes in water with 40 feet of visibility we surfaced to spitty rain and rough seas and visibility that was much worse above the seas than below!

Dive #4
With the seas kicking up we secured our gear and got underway quickly. By the time we got to French Reef the seas were 4-6 feet and very confused. (This is a very rough ride for the Keys.) Captain Craig didn't even slow down as an intense looking storm cell was bearing down and we continued on to Molasses Reef with a boat load of very ill divers. Dive Master Trace got the two worst guys positioned in one location and then very nicely cleared everyone else's dive gear up to the cabin area as the aft deck was awash as we plowed through the waves.

By the time we arrived at the Winch-Hole dive site on Molasses Reef the rest of the passengers were moving ever so slowly toward their equipment so we three were the first in the water and once we gave the OK signal to the boat we immediately sank below the roiling seas to the calmness of the reef.

As we swam toward the large, iron winch that gives this particular site it's name a brillant flash of light caught our attention. As no other divers were yet in the water it couldn't have been their camera's flash and we later found out that the Marine Buoy we moored beside took a direct hit of lightning! If you click through to this site you can see the conditions we were in on that day, from 10am till 11am the wind was 24 mph as the storm cell moved through.

It was really neat to watch the huge drops of rain strike the ocean from below and the waves rush past while we were nicely protected 33 feet below the surface. At the peak of the storm the visibility dropped from the usual 35 feet as the skies darkened and the light faded but came back once the darkest part of the storm passed.

This dive was just as spectacular as the previous three, perhaps more so with the contrast between the storm tossed seas and the calmness of the reef. The large winch was neat to see as well as several other iron artifacts. We again settled into a sandy patch and Rick had Marianna demonstrate Buddy Breathing again, making sure to emphasize maintaining physical and eye contact at all times. He then released us to explore or do what ever we wanted.

I settled down to observe a wall and Marianna laid herself down beside me on the bottom and proceeded to "sleep" snoring bubble rings toward the surface. After her "rest" she shook herself awake and played gazelle for awhile leaping from one sandy patch to another.

As we moved around the reef, some of us swimming and some gracefully leaping about, we traveled in a stacked formation with Rick leading, Marianna leaping about below and I just above. Which turned out to be a very good thing as her weight belt and she parted company. She bumped up into me, immediately dumped all air as I grabbed onto her and dumped the air from my BC too. We settled right down beside her weight belt which landed on the sand and got her belt back around her waist and then continued our dive. After 50 minutes we reluctantly surfaced to seas that were still confused but calming as the storm finally moved off.

So many neat things were seen, a nice sting ray flying over a coral formation, lots of Midnight Damselfish, Parrotfish, Queen Angels, Purple Sea Fans...we haven't even settled down with our Reef Fish book to formulate a list yet!



Marianna and I are so very happy and proud of ourselves for completing this dive course. The conditions on the last two dives were quite extreme, our Dive Instructor said they were pushing the limits of anything a Sport Diver should be out in; we handled an equipment malfunction beautifully, again according to our Instructor; and we both thouroughly enjoyed ourselves! I wish we had more pictures to share but on the check-out dives additional equipment is not brought along, but if you click through on the links above you can see several pictures and additional information on each of the dive sites.

It feels fabulous to be able to call ourselves SCUBA Divers now!