Now That's What I'm Talking About

It doesn't take long for the four of us to settle in and relax a bit at Pirates Bay Inn. Within a couple hours our names are already on the boards for the two morning dives for the next six days. Boat arrives at the dock there at 7:00 a.m. and we are on our way to a dive site by 7:30.

The vibe in Utila is a great one. The island is 7 miles long by 2 miles wide and has about 17 different dive shops on it. It is a mixture of Hondurans, ex-pats from the US and Canada and a wide range of people from all over the world. Utila does a lot of dive training, people getting certified and at least as many becoming divemasters and dive instructors. Because it is cheap to live and dive in Utila it is a "backpackers" paradise.

For example, Pirates Bay Inn also owns Captain Morgan's Dive Centre. If you sign up to get  open water certified with Captain Morgan's you can get free lodging at Pirates Bay Inn. They have private rooms that when you're doing dive training are $29 USD per night, clean and safe and comfortable (add $10 per night if you insist on having air conditioning). They also have some dorm style rooms that you can stay in for free if training, if not training you can stay there for $7 per night.

7:00 a.m. on Sunday morning we get up and go to the bar/restaurant at the resort. Its really more of a bar, there are no dining tables and wait staff, but there are plenty of chairs around, bar stools at the bar and a couple picnic tables close by, and really good food.

Christina does the majority of the cooking and boy is she good at it. You can get the usual, eggs, bacon, toast type breakfast, or baleadas (a thick flour tortilla folded over some mashed black beans and other ingredients like eggs and bacon or sausage, cheese), but you could also get crepes, fresh fruit, homemade yogurt, french toast, cereal, and of course coffee, iced or hot even a latte or espresso drink, and fruit juices. I usually had either a baleada or scrambled eggs, bacon and a tortilla (homemade right there) and coffee and a bottle of water to take on the dive boat and it cost about 70 lempiras. Yep that is just over $3 US.

The dive boat was filled  every morning with about 14 divers, usually about 6 of us "fun divers" already certified, and the rest in various stages of training, either open water or advanced open water students and an instructor for each of those classes a divemaster or two to lead the fun divers and usually at least one if not two or three dive masters in training.

We regularly went north for the first dive site of the day and south for the second. It all had to do with the wind and the waves. Most of our dives consisted of the boat mooring in about 25-40 feet of water at the top of a wall. The wall often dropped off to close to 100 feet.

The dives were beautiful, we were fortunate to see a lot of see life including turtles, spotted eagle rays, lots of green moray eels and the usual cast of caribbean sea life. Surprisingly we saw no sharks  during the entire week. I'm not sure why the lack of sharks in this area.

Green Moray Eel in for a cleaning by Coral Banded Shrimp

Beautiful coral

Queen Angelfish

The Halliburton Wreck

Sea Turtle

Tarpon

Blue Tang

Of course my desire was to take photos. I assembled my camera gear, put fresh rechargable batteries in my strobes and checked to make niether my strobes or housing leaked. I jumped in the water on the first day and my strobes would not fire. I took a few pictures but was really frustrated as once I got past about 30 feet I got none of the beautiful colors of the reef or the sea life.

I thought maybe there was a problem with the batteries and left my camera on the boat for the second dive. When we returned to the resort I borrowed a charger from Sandra and charged more batteries. Second day I jumped in the water and got about 2 shots where one of the strobes fired then they both failed again. I was afraid my hopes of lots of photography opportunities were going to be dashed completely. That afternoon we checked out strobes and batteries, testing different batteries in each strobe. Finally, after a bit of futzing with the connectors on the cap of the battery compartment of the strobes I got them to work. May need to buy new caps (although I'm secretly hoping to find a way to upgrade my entire system actually but don't think my sparkling personality is paying for one and doubt I could find enough people who would want to donate to a "Go Fund Me" request).

I did try on the second day to change my attitude and rather than giving up and being upset about the equipment failure to try and work on my ability to take some good shots with just the ambient light. It is tough and I hate to lose the color, but just the change in attitude just made the diving better anyway. Overall I wasn't particularly happy with many of my photos from this trip but it serves as just a reminder that I have to just keep working on learning photography more, and taking lots of pictures .. only way I'll get better.

Chris a native Utilian from Pidgeon Cay, our divemaster, carried a spear with him on most dives and did his best to reduce the lionfish population, and Eitan an Israeli instructor on the boat with us on a majority of the days we dove also speared lots of lionfish. Greg finally got his chance to carry a spear and after a few misses early on he and Chris got a beautiful bunch of lionfish. On Sunday they brought their catch back to the Pirates Bay, cleaned the lionfish then lightly breaded them and fried them up for lunch and after a great haul on Thursday by Chris and Greg they brought them back cleaned them and Christina made Lionfish Ceviche.

Greg's first Utila lionfish kill.

Chris Howell, our divemaster with his and Greg's lionfish haul destined for ceviche.

On Wednesday we got the biggest treat. On  our way to the dive site we came upon a large pod of dolphins. Our Captain, Whitney stopped and we got to get in the water with snorkel gear and swim with them. It was so great to be in the water so close to these beautiful creatures. Then after getting back on the boat when we took of several of pod surfed the bow wake of our boat. I lay on the bow of the boat and took the video, when they would breach  I could have probably reached out and touched them they were so close. It just made my week perfect. I had hoped to upload the video here but that seems beyond my capabilities.

Also on Wednesday night Paula and I volunteered with Sea Shepherd to help in guarding the beach and the nests of turtle eggs and any turtles coming up on the beach to lay their eggs. Unfortunately there are still those who would come out and steal the turtle eggs to sell on the black market. At 7 p.m. we went to the BICA (Bay Islands Conservation Association) office, which also houses the new Sea Shepherd office and met with  Fernando, the coordinator of this program and Chel who would be the person actually logging research information about nests and eggs etc., as well as Haley, a visitor from Wales who like us just wanted to volunteer. We rode out on ATV's to a secluded beach set up a tarp with some sleeping bags laid out on it and started our watch. It consisted of every hour walking one half or the other of about 600 meters of beach, watching for signs of turtles coming up on the beach, signs of poachers, or signs of turtles returning to the sea.Then we returned to the base camp and slept until the next patrol, from 7 p.m. til about 4:30 a.m. We didn't get to see any new nests laid or turtles but Chel was kind enough to show us a nest of eggs which had been laid two nights before. We saw two or three eggs of what is likely about 200 eggs in the nest. The eggs stay in the nest for 52 days so my plan is to be there on August 8th to see those babies hatch and hopefully make their way back to the ocean.

Turtle Eggs in their nest.

All in all a great week of diving with great friends.

My dive buddies, L  to R: Greg, Paula, Sandra

Next post: The other part of the trip to Utila and returning to Placencia.

Planning for the Big Adventure

I've been thinking about this for a while, this idea to just up and move and now I'm actually doing it. But let me back up a bit, for those that don't know how I got "here", planning to go "there".

I retired from a career in law enforcement in California in 2008. Following my daughter who had moved to Tennessee the year before I up and moved to Nashville. A good move, for both my mental, emotional and physical health and definitely for my monetary health.

I've long dreamt of becoming a writer. You know, a real one, with published books and all that. Once retired I had to begun to ask, what was stopping me (besides that awful internal critic who kept reminding me I could NEVER be a writer). So I attended a writer's workshop and started writing a memoir, about my career mostly and my life. And I kept on writing and dragging that internal critic around with me.

I had learned to Scuba Dive when I was in my early 20's in California, my dad had wanted someone to take Scuba lessons with him and it seemed like a good idea to me. I liked the "idea" of scuba diving but in that 53 degree water in Monterey I was not having a very good time. I was cold, the visibility didn't look at all like those tropical postcards I had always seen and did I mention, I was cold. So I had the card that said I was certified and never dove. Then in about 2006 I had the opportunity to try again. I did and although I had more of a desire and I was obviously more mature than I was in my early 20's, the water was still 53 degrees in Monterey and I was still cold. But I had to admit, I really did think it seemed like it would be fun if I could get warmer and see more.

As each year passes I find myself hating winter more and more. It looks pretty in pictures but other than that you can keep it. And the idea to move where winter wasn't an issue kept running through my brain. In 2012 I finally actually wrote a bucket list and on it I listed wanting to finish my book I was writing, diving more and I listed some of the places I longed to go and mostly wanting to move to somewhere tropical .... no more winter.

I am happy to say, I finished a first draft of the book, it is nowhere near done, in fact I may rewrite the entire thing but I did write a first draft. I continue to work on editing and I am now excited about writing fiction as well. I got to attend a writer's workshop in Montana near the entrance to Glacier National Park, it was a stunning locale and it re-energized my writing brain.

I have been fortunate enough to travel to some amazing places in the world to dive including the Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Cozumel, Belize, Roatan, Truk Lagoon in Micronesia, Hawaii, Australia (only one short shore dive but I'm not complaining, I still spent 3 weeks in Oz), and I just returned from Fiji.

In August of 2012 I became a scuba diving instructor and I have also started taking underwater photographs.

Finally about 18 months ago I decided I was ready, I wanted to move to somewhere warm, tropical, where I could dive and write and take pictures. My plan was to move in June of 2013. As June approached I decided I wasn't really ready, where would I go, what would I do, how could I .......

I put it off and extended my apartment lease for 7 months. But I sat myself down and had a long talk with me and finally decided, if not now, when? And I made my life mantra the Richard Burroughs quote, "Leap, and the net will appear".

The other quote I am living by is the one that titles this blog, by George Addair ....  "Everything you've ever wanted is on the other side of fear."

My lease is actually up this week. But I'm already out. In fact, I have left Tennessee in my rear view mirror and I am in California for a short stay. I'm walking through the fear to the other side, I"m leaping and hoping for the net to appear, and I'm doing it all just flying by the seat of my pants. This blog is part of that journey, a diary of the adventure, the good, the bad, the scary and the exciting and some other stuff, like my writing, my pictures and the things I am most passionate about.

I'm hoping you will join me, keep me in your best thoughts for good weather, fun, adventure, beautiful pictures, great dives and some day maybe a book tour with my published work! And wherever I land, I hope you'll be with me, either through this blog or come visit, we'll go for a dive!