There is nothing much sexier than your husband, lugging all of your scuba gear, after a thrilling scuba diving trip. First, I love that he loves the water and scuba diving as much as me. He's already planning our next year anniversary scuba diving trip and seems even more excited than I am!
The scuba diving trip was amazing, spectacular, really one of a kind. As I mentioned yesterday, I had bad dreams all night about the cave diving and so, Chris very sweetly went and tracked down the dive master and changed our cave diving plans to open water diving with just 30 minutes to spare. It was definitely the right choice.
Chris doesn't know how amazing our dives were yesterday because he's a new scuba diver but they were incredible. There were not that many divers (unlike Cozumel which is like Disneyland for divers) and we had both dive sites entirely to ourselves. The first site was a baby reef with so-so coral formations. It was mostly so the divemaster could check out our skill before taking us to the more difficult second dive. But, even though it was the easier of the two dives, it was still spectacular with a massive school of shiny fish (no idea what they were - bigger than my fist, smaler than my head, silvery) of about 300 to 400 fish schooling around us, and not darting off as we got closer. We also saw 2 color changing flounders, 3 rays, 1 large wolf spotted eel and the best of all? A moray eel that was at least 8 feet long, with a girth bigger than my thigh, fully stretched out under a ledge. It was increedible.
The second dive really took the cake though. It was spectacular for clarity, there was a strong current so we did not have to swim which was nice and there were turtles everywhere. The dive site is actually called Tortuga because of the 30 or so turtles that live there. I actually touched a moray eel, which turns out is smooth and slimy feeling, and saw a frog fish (very rare, only found in Cozumel, which we were fairly near) swimming. That alone was worth the dive. But the coolest part of the dive was once in a lifetime, never to be repeated again - a school of terapin numbering 60 to 80 (our dive master said 120) that we literally stalked to get close to.
Terapin are these crazy large prehistoric creatures that are similar to a shark or a barracuda, only they are well over 6 feet long and hundreds of pounds. They are silver with teeth and are impressive in that they have dorsal fins that resemble sharks. And they swim around menancingly, like sharks do.
When we saw the school, we immediately deflated to the bottom of the sea floor (I stung myself on some coral getting down quickly, which burned the rest of the dive) and literally crept along the sea floor on our fingers, slowly getting close to the school. Once we were close, we stayed still until they tired of us and then, we just watched them swarm around us for about 10 minutes. Our divemaster, Pepe, got very close to about 10 of them and it was clear by comparing his size to theirs that they were bigger by maybe 6 to 12 inches and also a hundred pounds. He looked puny next to them.
I read through my entire dive log this morning and found that I had never even seen one terapin in all of my 13 years of diving and to see an entire school of them on our honeymoon, on Chris's third open water dive, was breathtaking. And then when you add in the turtles, there are not enough superlatives to rave on about the dive. It was once in a lifetime.
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