...and ran into two more rock-lobsters sitting on their rock-lobstery shelf! They'd pretty much terrified me during my night dive, but this time around in the bright sunshine, they seemed almost friendly!
Here's a pic of my depth gauge at my max depth for the dive. Check out the bottom right corner - even though I'm 100' underwater (30 meters), the water temperature is still 87°F! How crazy is that? Anyway, right as we hit the 100' mark, we had a visit from a turtle who was curious about us!
...and I talked Meredith into trying scuba diving again! She had given it a shot during our accidental vacation to Jamaica, but had a lot trouble getting her ears to equalize - which is really painful - and so she was a little hesitant to try it again. But after I told her about the shallow dive at Stingray City where you get to pet, friendly, Muppety stingrays, she decided to give it another shot! Here she is suited up and about to dive in!
...I came across a huge sheet of siding from a house! Later our dive master explained that it was debris from a house that had been destroyed when Hurricane Ivan slammed into Grand Cayman in September of 2004.
I spent a lot of right above the ocean floor looking for hidden nooks and swim-throughs where there might be some sleeping turtles (Yes, turtles look for little hidden nooks to sleep underwater in!). I spotted what looked like a swim-through that went underneath a reef and just as I was about to go in head first...
I've only done a few night dives! They're fun, but creepy. Being underwater is already kind of scary and intimidating, but when you're field of vision is reduced to the tiny, directional beam of your torch, it's even more scary. Here's a pufferfish I found and swam with for a while.
We jumped in around 8:30. Check out the thousands of little creatures (Tiny shrimps? Krill?) that were swarming around my flashlight and I made my descent into the inky darkness! Spoooooky!
This time I managed to get him on video! I love how he causally swims over to check me out before swimming away! (You'll probably also get a kick out of listening to me make noises into my regulator trying to get his turtle-attention underwater! Hahaha).
After a few more passes, Meredith had gotten used to the stingrays and was feeding them and petting them like a seasoned pro! The creatures are so big and heavy (they must easily weigh 100+ lbs!) it takes a while to figure out how to feed them without getting knocked over when they get friendly and swim into you!
Which is exactly what happened to me! Our divemaster had warned us that the suction was so strong that if we accidentally got our fingers sucked into the mouth, that we wouldn't be able to get them out! He then explained that if this should happen, you should just relax and that after a few seconds, the stingray would realize our fingers were non-edible and would stop the suction and then you can get your fingers out.
This is exactly what happened to me! Except that when my finger got sucked in, I felt his grindplates grind on my finger, thought "HOLY FUCK! This one's got TEETH!" and then panicked and ripped my hand out of it's mouth as hard as I could! The cut you see on my hand is from where the suction pulled the skin right off my finger! Crazy, right?
Here's a closer view! On the boat, our divemaster explained to us that stingrays don't have teeth - instead they have two cartilaginous "grind plates" that they use to chew their food. When they smell something good, they can generate a ton of suction and they use it to suck the food up into their mouth!
...you can stick out a finger or thumb and put it on their nose and lead them around. It's really funny. You can go around and and around and the stingray will stick right with your hand because it knows you've got some squid in there. Then, when you're ready, you open your hand as quick as you can and hold your hand flat so that when the stingray turns on the super-suction, your fingers don't get sucked up along with the squid!
It was a little scary, but I realized that it was totally my mistake and that the little guy hadn't meant to get a chunk of manflesh. He even came back over to say hi...
The stingray's eyes are on top and it's mouth is all the way underneath. See his happy lil' muppet mouth peeking out? It totally looks like he's smiling!
The rays showed up only a few minutes after we'd arrived on the bottom! Seeing them glide in together is one of the most memorable things I've ever seen. They're graceful and beautiful, but at the same time they're really alien and evil-looking and they have a stinger under their tail that can kill a person!
But at the same time, they were clearly playful and interested in being fed - so I was able to swallow my fear and relax. (This was dive was on August 23rd. Just eleven days later Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray in a freak accident!)
We rounded the corner of a reef we were following, and we entered a pocket that was formed by the intersection of three huge underwater mountains and there was...
We just floated in there in awe letting them swim around us. I managed to snap this pic that I think does a good job showing off just how silvery and reflective they were. It was breathtaking.
I hate to keep repeating myself, but these photos really don't even begin to convey what it looks like down there (because cameras are less sensitive to colors that your eyes). See how in the photo above, all of the coral is a drag, olive green? Well, here's a close up of the rocks taken with a flash that does a better job at showing what everything looks like while you're diving. Crazy, right?
Puffer fish! I swam with this guy for a while. He didn't seem to mind me so I used the flash on my camera (which helped bring out some of the reds and oranges that weren't showing up on the camera using available light).
About an hour later, we were back under for our second dive. (Just like with a "safety stop" you have to rest between dives to give your body some time to aspirate extra nitrogen that's accumulated in your blood stream. If you have too much nitrogen in your blood and ascend quickly, you'll get decompression sickness - aka: "the bends"). The water visibility at the second dive spot was just as incredible as the first!
Any time you do multiple dives in a day, your first dive is always the deepest. Since this was our second dive in a short period of time, we stayed relatively shallow. (The deeper you go, the more nitrogen your body absorbs with each breath).
Back in the sandy shallows I snapped a few photos while doing my safety stop. (A safety stop is when you stay at a certain depth for a few minutes in order to aspirate some of the nitrogen in your bloodstream).
Right around the edge of the cliff, we hit our max depth and started to slowly make our ascent back to the boat. Here's some pretty coral on the way back.
The reef we were swimming along was relatively shallow, but at one point, we reached the edge of the reef and there's a cliff that drops 6,000 feet straight down! Here's the diver in front of me floating over the cliff's edge looking out into the oblivion that divers call "The Big Blue." Fucking insane.
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