Manuel was our dive master again.
This was another part of the Palancar Reef we dove earlier. After three days of having a very secure weight belt buckle and getting a tiny bit of salt water in my mask every time I rolled in (which always managed to hit my left eye while it was open, pissing me off to no end for the first 15 minutes of each dive) I decided to put both my hands on my mask this time. Of course, my weight belt fell off. I only noticed because instead of slowy sinking upon entry I actually floated. We were wearing 2.5mm shorties and had big steel tanks so my belt only weighed a trivial 5 lbs. I was able to swim down to the sandy bottom at 65 feet and pick it up with no trouble. This is very different from my normal southern California environment in which a 20-30 lbs weight belt is standard and the loss of it will result in you shooting out of the water like a polaris missile. The rest of the dive was uneventful and we saw the usual set of incredible vistas, walls, corals, sponges, and fish. There used to be an underwater statue of Jesus on this site. It has since been moved to shallower water where snorklers can see it. We saw the former base of the statue here. This site had numerous swim throughs and ended with a long twisting one that ended with a vertical chimney like exit.
This was a narrow shallower spotty reef set in a sandy bottom. There was a decent current this time, about 3-4 kts. There were lots and lots of nooks to poke around in and a good portion of them had lobster or crabs in them. We saw a couple of eels and spent most of the dive just getting familiar with the area as we would be doing a night dive here. I did find an enourmous sponge under one ledge near the end of the reef. It was, however, completely out classed by a sponge we later saw on Half Moon Wall in Belize.
This was an entertaining dive, everything tends to look different at night. We saw a lot of big crabs and had lots of fun trying to get them to look defensive (which they are very good at). I did find a spotted moray at one point and reached back to discover I had nothing to rap on my tank to attract the rest of the groups attention. I cleverly used my dive light as a make shift banger, and surprise, surprise, it went out. Now in total darkness I spent some time trying to maintain neutral bouyancy while blindly digging around my BC for my backup light. When I finally found it the eel was gone and the group was almost out of sight so I had to give up the hunt. Later in the dive my big light decided to work again. Our usual 5 to 10 minute safety stop was far more entertaining at night due to the presence of biolumincent plankton. Agitating the water makes them glow and I almost made my self dizzy swimming a tight circle while watching my fin tips trail glowing "bubbles".
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