We are trying very hard to do a whale sharks tour but so far the weather and sea conditions have just not been favorable! Our first scheduled day was Tuesday but the rainy weather was too awful for boats to go out and the harbor in Cancun was closed. Our next scheduled trip was for today, but at the last minute last night they had to cancel due to rough seas. Our third and final date is tomorrow so we'll see if 3rd time's a charm!
Five of us had originally planned on diving Sunday afternoon but when they cancelled the trip today, we knew they were going to try and reschedule for Sunday and thus we would lose our dives. At nine o'clock last night with some scrambling, we managed to reschedule our dives for this morning with plans for a two tank dive and then a night dive conditions permitting.
We arrived at the dive shop at 8:15am this morning very excited to get our dives in! We finished filling out the paperwork and gathered rental equipment before heading down to the boat on the beach. The surf was a bit rough but nothing we couldn't managed so we climbed aboard. Usually divers assemble their own tanks and equipment, but because the seas were rougher than usual, they assembled everything for us. We requested a site that would show us turtles and rays and so the boat headed out to a reef called Tortugas (spanish for turtle). On the way out, the water was quite rough and we got completely soaked! Not a big deal for someone about to head into the water, but still a big difference from what we're used to!
When we arrived at the dive site, we paired up, rolled into the water and descended down. Tortugas is a drift dive as the current is quite strong. It was a very pleasant dive because it required very little movement or swimming! We just let the current carry us over the reef and watched for critters, fish and coral. During our dive, we saw 5 sea turtles and a sting ray in addition to a bunch of huge beautiful reef fish and 6 lion fish. I loved my wet suit keeping me warm at 66 ft down!
We did a 5 minute decompression stop at 40 feet and then a 3 minute safety stop at 15 feet before finally ascending to the surface an hour later. Once on the surface with inflated buoys to signal the boat, we drifted in the current and waited to be retrieved. Problem...the boat was nowhere to be seen! A couple of minutes turned into 15, 20, then 40 minutes with us floating on the open ocean desperately waiting and hoping our boat would come find us in the rough seas. Finally we caught the attention of another dive boat passing in the area with our whistle and buoys and they came to our rescue. Although the divemaster and I were fine, my other 4 friends were really nauseous from being tossed in the ocean for so long. We were exhausted climbing onto the boat but very grateful for their aid! They ended up calling our dive shop to have them send the boat to our location to pick us up and return us to shore. That meant getting back in the water and swimming over to the shop boat...ugh. My poor nauseous friends were devastated by this news and I can't say I was too excited either. We managed to roll back overboard, a couple of us with less than 300psi of air and no snorkels (they told us they were unnecessary!!!), and swim over to our dive boat. We headed back to shore roughly but uneventfully and were so glad to finally be back on shore.
The dive shop was mortified by what had happened and promised us this was a rare occurrence and the break in protocol would be addressed. We ended up skipping the 2nd dive and cancelling the night dive as no one had any energy left or desire to tangle with the ocean for any more today.
Hopefully the weather will be favorable tomorrow morning for whale sharks, but if it's not, I will definitely be trying to plan another dive because I'm sad we didn't get to do much today and I love diving so much. As we were told on day one, some dives will be phenomenal and some are going to be terrible but it doesn't make the overall activity bad. It's very true. The dive itself was excellent and the dive shop handled what happened well. They were extremely apologetic, gave us the dive and equipment rental for free today, and were just overall horrified at our experience. I am ecstatic that we got to see turtles and a ray and it was so neat diving in a new location. Unfortunately I didn't manage to get my camera off the boat in its new housing before descending so I don't have any pictures, but I think that's for the best given our long surface stranding!
No comments:
Post a Comment