Day 4- Best Diving Yet!

Day 4 (Wednesday) was my (Kristy’s) best day of diving. The first dive (Palancar Caves) was a little rough because of all of the swim-throughs. Even after three days of diving, I still do not relax in them and the anxiety makes me breath in more of my air. It was the first dive that I actually had to show the dive master that I was running low by the safety stop. However, that was not enough to make the dive bad. We saw 3-4 sea turtles. I was the last one into one of the swim-throughs and right before I went in, I saw a turtle. It saw me and was very curious. It swam a half circle around my mask about a foot away with its left eye one me the whole time. I just turned slowly in a circle and watched the beautiful animal.

The second dive was even better. The dive master took the group through a swim-through. I had had too many of those on the first dive. On the boat, the dive master told us that if we did not want to go through them, we could follow the bubbles on top of the reef. I started the dive with 300 lbs less air and did not want to use it up on a swim-through. As I followed the bubbles, I looked up and about 4 feet away from me with a fish cleaning its underside was a spotted eagle ray. It is my favorite sea creature. I was thrilled. I got to watch it a few moments until it swam one direction and the current took me the opposite. No one else in our group saw it. The divers on the other boat saw it and were talking about it on shore. My guess is that they are not as common here as in Belize. We don’t have a picture of one from this trip since photographer Ken was under the coral at the time. I’m posting an old one from Belize to remind you of what an eagle ray looks like.

We also decided to try a night dive tonight. It was only my second night dive ever and the last one was 10 years ago. I was a little nervous. Fortunately, I calmed down as soon as I got down and starting seeing the things that we never see during the day. We saw sharp-tail eel, Spanish lobster, puffer fish (not puffed though), yellow stingrays, flounder, spiny lobster, squid, anemone, and more. It was a good dive as well.