Marc and I swam on the surface to the Eastern edge of the reef to perform the three ascents. He was having a lot of trouble equalizing to get down to 33 ft, so I decided did the CESA first. He did just fine. He also successfully made the alternate air source ascent and the buddy breathing ascent.
Having finished the ascents, we headed back to the reef to meet up with Luis and swim back to the beach. Along the way, we spotted the lobster trap I saw a few weeks ago.
Near the reef, I got a good shot of a Smooth Trunkfish.
Luis spotted us before I spotted him. He charged over and signalled that we should follow him. He lead us to a school of Atlantic Spadefish.
They are really quite graceful, swimming in unison.
I also spotted and shot a Blue Spotted Coronetfish. I was too far away.
I got a great shot of Marc as he swam between me and the sun.
On the beach, we met up with Leonardo, Guillermo and Victor, who had come to do a navigation dive. Everyone got a compass and we went through a short lecture on how to use the compass, then we hit the water. I set up shop at the swim buoy and had a flag for each of the buddy pairs.
We first measured kickcycles. I have Leo the end of a 100 ft reel and he swam out, counting his kickcycles. Everyone else followed, doing the same. He was supposed to drop the line and swim back, also counting those kickcycles, but next time I saw him he was well West of me and the swim buoy. He was still holding the line.
Surprisingly, the line was not tangled and so I got it back on the reel quickly and we moved on to the out 'n back skill. I set the compass bezel to a particular bearing and had each buddy pair swim out on that bearing 20 kickcycles, then swim back. They did not always come back to the swim buoy.
We did it a couple of times so that everyone got a chance to navigate and found their way back to where they had started.
They we swam a square pattern. The first attempt was terrible, but we kept at it and they finally got it.
On the way back to the beach I spotted this Sand Diver nearly buried in the sand, but patiently waiting for prey.
No comments:
Post a Comment