5

Saturday, October 9, 2004:

Like most days on Utila, today revolves around diving.

I wake up at 6 AM and have a brief swim in the hostel's pool. As usual, its sunny and hot out, with a clear blue sky. Nobody else is in sight and it would be tempting to stay in the water for a while. Nevertheless, I am dressed in my swimsuit and down at the Bay Islands College of Diving by 6:45 to load my gear onto the 7:30 boat.

I'm planning to spend the morning "fun" diving. Four out of my five required Advanced Open Water course dives are complete and the fifth is slated for Sunday. This leaves me with a day to dive for fun and, in addition to the two dives I have planned in the morning, I am also scheduled to go on a "night" dive at 6 PM.

Other divers arrive and begin to load equipment and air tanks onto the dive boat. The divemasters leading the diving assign the divers "buddies," the "buddy system" being a hallmark of PADI diving (the mantra: never dive alone; always dive with a "buddy"). I'm paired up with a laid back Californian named Dave, in his mid-late 20's, a realtor on indefinite "sabbatical." I already buddied with Dave on a couple of dives a few days back. After the dives, Dave told me that he repeatedly became sick while underwater and threw up several times through his regulator, though he did not want to discontinue his diving (he could have signaled to us that something was wrong, in which case we would have ascended). His eyes were bloodshot pink and he looked wretched. Nevertheless, he told me this happened to him from time to time, particularly when he had not dived for a while. I am not sure its such a good idea to dive if you find yourself getting sick like this all the time, but its not my decision to make.

Robert, from Ireland, will be our divemaster and will lead us. He's been on Utila for six months and is a certified instructor who has been on some of my Advanced Open Water dives to observe the way that the course is being taught.

On our first dive of the day, we head alongside a wall of coral and back, descending to a maximum depth of 60 feet and seeing numerous fish endemic to these waters. The dive is relaxing and the views are spectacular, although there are no unusual sightings of marine life.

On the surface, Dave tells us he threw up again. Maybe he should stop eating eggs for breakfast, he says. Maybe he should stop eating breakfast, I say.

We switch tanks, then wait for the other divers to return to the boat. The captain takes us toward the next dive site when somebody points a finger and motions to the front port. Dolphins. The captain banks the boat slightly and we are suddenly racing side by side with a school of 12-15 dolphins. A few of them jump from the surface and they keep up with us for a couple of minutes before turning for open water and away.

Our second dive begins like the first. Calm and placid, with amazing reef everywhere. Then, suddenly, there is an enormous barracuda, nearly 4 feet long, swimming 8-10 feet away from us. It moves in fits and spasms, drifting slowly and deliberately for a moment, before lunging rapidly forward with a lash of its tail. It spirals around to our left for a moment and we notice that a smaller fish has caught it attention. The little fish races into an embankment of coral and the baraccuda hurtles after it, then abruptly stops before the coral outcropping. It floats there, virtually motionless, with its mouth open, its eyes wide and menacing --- waiting. We have to swim on.

As always, I'm starving after the dives. I head to a little place called "Mamita's" where I get myself an order of 4 "super baleadas." Despite an extensive knowledge of central American food, cultivated meticulously through years of binging on Taco Bell, I had never heard of baleadas before coming to Utila. Now I am positively addicted to them. A baleada is a thick, soft tortilla filled with refried beans and other fillings, typically sauteed onion and some or all of the following: egg, avocado, cheese, meat, etc... These had beans, onion, fresh avocado, egg and a little bit of ground beef. Add hot sauce and... Mmmmmmmm.

I head back to the Mango Inn and spent the afternoon at the pool, doing my impression of a beached sea turtle. A girl from Holland, a guy from Israel and another guy from Switzerland hang out there with me for a while and we take turns grilling the Swiss guy on why the Swiss are so quiet on the national stage and what they are up to. He seems slightly nervous.

After a few hours of doing nothing at all, I stop by the poolside cafe for a fishburger. While I wait (and wait and wait and wait, as they are evidentally catching the fish first), I watch hummingbirds buzz around a birdfeeder at astounding speeds.

Finally, I head back down to BICD to load my gear for the night boat. For this dive, I will be buddying with Robert (the Irish instructor) while one of the instructors, Pete, leads us and another student. In addition, two divemasters will be diving along with us, just for the fun of it, giving us a total of 6 divers. Our ride to the dive site takes only a few moments and the divemasters set up a reference line, a weighted rope tied to a life preserver fastened to the buoy by the boat. We don't use reference lines for day dives, but at night you want extra control over the rate at which you descend and ascend, since its harder to spot the surface and the bottom and harder to control yourself without the use of these references.

We test our flashlights, check the rest of our gear and get into the water. Then we descend while holding onto the reference line. At the bottom, some 40 feet down, we come to rest on a patch of sand. Our dive site is called "Moon Hole" and consists of this circular sand bed in the middle of a ring of coral. In the darkness, it is somewhat unnerving. We get our bearings and begin to swim around the coral, shining our lights ahead of and around us.

We don't see a lot, but what we do see is completely unique to a dive at night. First, as I am passing closely over a bed of coral, I spot a single shrimp nestled inside a hole. It darts away quickly, but the striking thing about it is the way its eyes are illuminated, virtually luminescent, like the light from a firefly, but more intense. Second, as the dive begins, a few dozen tiny red things, moving so rapidly and erratically I cannot discern their shapes, begin swarming around my flashlight and hand. As the dive continues, more and more of these little things buzz around the light and my arm, until what must be thousands of them accumulate and even begin to slightly obscure the beam. As they flutter around me, dozens of small fish begin to swim around them, no doubt making meals of them. Once I hear a rapping sound on my mask, only to realize that a couple of fish collided with it in their haste to get a free meal. At the surface, I learn that these little things were zooplankton(http://www.imagequest3d.com/staticpages/zooplankton/).

After three dives, I am simply done for. In bed by 9:30 and fast asleep. I'm even too tired to eat... something I didn't think was possible.