Two Tank Dive

My roommate, classmate, and I did a two tank dive this morning! My roommate did her two dives to finish her certification and our other friend and I were just there to have a good time under water. Instead of doing reef dives, we chose to go to two of Grenada's shallow wrecks.

We started the morning out by suiting up and hopping on the smaller dive shop boat. The water was rougher today than it has been on previous dives, but nothing like what I'm used to seeing at home in the Atlantic! Our first dive site was the Veronica L., a wreck off the coast of Grand Anse Beach that is 120 ft long and about 50ft deep. The hull is completely open so we were able to swim in and look around. The wreck is teeming with life - there are corals and algae covering every spec of wreck surface and tons of fish and crustaceans browsing about. It was too deep to take my camera, but it was amazing all the same to stop and look at everything without lining up the perfect shots. After we'd spent ample time at the wreck, we swam along a section of Boss reef, taking in the critters and corals inhabiting the area.

When we first rolled into the water and put our regulators in, I could tell something wasn't quite right with my primary regulator. On the surface, I kept finding extra water splash in it which was annoying but didn't inhibit my ability to breathe. When I stuck my face in the water, it seemed to go away so I ignored it. As soon as we started to descend, it was definitely leaking, and before we got more than a few feet, I signaled something was wrong with my regulator and went back to the surface. I ended up just switching to my back up regulator (inspection later on boat revealed that the mouth piece had a large hole in it!). I prefer regulators that deliver air easily on demand, rather than making you "work" for it. When I say work, I just mean that there is a little extra resistance to breathing when you breathe in. My back up regulator was also being kind of strange, but it wasn't leaking and it wasn't enough of a problem for me to skip the dive. When facing upwards towards the surface, the resistance was quite great and the more upside vertical I went, the easier is was to take a full breath. Time for regulator maintenance! Equipment issues just serve to keep you more on your toes I guess! I swapped out the regulator system when we got back on the boat, so I wasn't stuck with a weird regulator the whole time.

One of the frustrating parts of diving is that it's difficult to communicate under water. You can't talk, and motions/gestures can be limited or confusing. The dive instructor under water who saw me using my backup was obviously concerned (I think initially he just thought I made a mistake). How do you say leaking in hand signals?! We have some universal signs to relay basic vitals like "ok," "something's wrong," "out of air," "low on air," "ascend," and "descend," to name a few, but its hard to get too complex!

For our next dive, we headed back to shore to swap out divers and pick up fresh tanks. We then headed out to Three Parts Wreck, also off the coast of Grand Anse Beach. The water in this location was even rougher - not too rough for the boat, but definitely makes things interesting when you're trying not to drift away in the water! This time we descended as a group of five, my roommate and two other girls completing certification dives and my friend and I diving as buddies for fun. This wreck was a little bit shallower at 40 feet, so I took my camera with me! The certification divers had a few skills to demonstrate so my friend and I were just going to poke around when we got to the bottom for awhile. I had no problems descending and immediately began taking pictures of the wreck. I looked up after a couple of minutes because my buddy was still several feet above me. I signaled to ask if she was okay and she replied with mask issues. I ascended to her point to take a look, and noticed that the mask looked way too tight and that it was leaking like crazy. She was trying to fix it underwater, but was having too much trouble, so we ended up just ascending to the surface. Enter trouble ;). We fixed her mask on the surface, told the boat in the distance not to worry, and headed back down. I had forgotten the whole current issue we encountered when first getting in and definitely had not taken into account just how far we had drifted from the wreck! We got back down halfway and a quick look at our surroundings told us we were lost! A couple of shadows off in the distance looked vaguely promising, so we decided to swim a few kicks in that direction. After a moment or so, we realized that wasn't going to do much for us and ascended to look for the diving buoy. When we popped out of the water, we discovered just how far we'd drifted - quite far away! Ever the optimist, I began swimming towards it (it's really hard to do in choppy water!) but we lucked out and were "rescued" by the boat. The driver was definitely not pleased with us - oops. We didn't mean to! It seemed like such a quick and simple fix at the time! We were able to head back over to our original site and finish doing the dive.

The rest of the dive was uneventful. Lots of pretty things to look at and take pictures of. We spent nearly an hour at the bottom before heading back up to head in for the day.

All in all a couple of great dives! Can't wait to go back for more! Hopefully I'll get to do a night dive soon but who knows how the scheduling for that will work out.