Soft corals abound in the Belizean portion of the Meso American reef

You are hear for a cleaning I presume

In diving I have noticed that some places just have more interesting stuff to see. Sure There are a lot of places that have quite a bit of critter diversity. But I have seen very few places that have the bio diversity that exist in Anilao in the Philippines. Granted most of the critters are not much bigger than a U.S. quarter, but there sure a lot of differences that exist.

The critters run the gamut from nudibranchs to crabs, to shrimp to fish and of course there are a variety of octopi.

Some of the critters remind me of something you might find from outer space.

Others are almost comical in how they adorn themselves with various bits and bobs.

And you can also find the occasional blue ring octopus in a clam shell.

With the pandemic of 2020, last year was the longest surface interval I’ve had in a long time. It’s been hard not getting back to blue water for so long because for me it provides a opportunity to get away from the office and to explore an environment that is completely different. There are so many things to see in the deep blue sea, and yet it is relatively quiet. Of course on a good day you can hear the fish feeding on algae on the reef. Unfortunately, Dallas is nowhere near any blue water. Although diving in some local lakes did provide some opportunity to see some aquatic life in 20202, the variety of marine life in Texas lakes pales by comparison with almost any blue water I’ve ever seen.

When the opportunity came to dive Cozumel in February 2021, I jumped at it. Thank you Gulf Coast Scuba for inviting me to join the trip and bring my rebreather and my camera. Thank you for making all of the arrangements with the local dive shop Deep Exposure who made sure we had sorb, tanks and boosted 02 and made sure we saw a variety of dive sites.

We had a very capable group of divers on the trip most of whom were open circuit divers, but three of us dove rebreather‘s.

Here are my general observations of the trip. First Cozumel like most dive communities around the world, has been hit pretty hard by the pandemic. Although Cozumel may have started opening up over six months ago, Cozumel at this time has nowhere near the crowds of people who typically travel there to dive.

Second, the locals seem to be doing a pretty good job at trying to keep Covid under control. There was lots of hand “tequila” and masks were used indoors, but less so outside.

Third, the reefs look to be in pretty good shape because there hasn’t been a lot of diving pressure on them for about a year. There was nowhere near the crowd of divers on the reef today. It was nothing like what I recalled from years past.

Diving my Hollis prism rebreather on the reef was challenging and exciting. As usual in Cozumel the current was moving pretty quickly. It was not uncommon to have 2 plus knots of current to drift long the walls. Since several of our dives were in the 80 minute range we covered a lot of reef in each dive.

As long as you were not headed into the current the rebreather was fine. The few places where we had to cut across the current even though it was for just a short distance it was very challenging.

But, the thing that was most fascinating to me was how close we could get to the fish and aquatic life while on the rebreathers. Open circuit divers could not even begin to approach how close we could get. We had quite a few turtles practically swim right up to us and we had fish that were so close we could have petted them if we wanted to.

Another challenge, the underwater camera housing, lights, etc that I dive with act like a sail in the current. Even though the camera system is almost neutrally bouyant it’s bulk was still a pretty good challenge to handle.

We did have some technical challenges. Before leaving on the trip I had replaced all three sensors for my rebreather. I tested them in the pool. They were fine. I got to Cozumel they failed. I would’ve been cooked had it not been for the one of the co-owners of Gulf Coast scuba, Aiar Ghelber who came up with three new sensors for my rebreather. I think in the future I will probably travel with 3 backup sensors, just to be on the safe side.

Trying to get the camera in position to take pictures that looked like something was not an easy endeavor based on the current. In fact, it was exhausting. But ultimately I did get a few shots that I like.

So is it time to go back to Cozumel? Well I might wait a week or two to catch up at work, but hopefully reasonably soon I will be back.