Hey Ma! I know what I want to be when I grow up! I’m going to be irresponsible, quit my job (oh, wait, already did that…), and run off to Belize to go to work in a dive shop! I don’t care if I’m just washing wetsuits and slicing fruit for the divers to eat during their surface intervals. As long as I get to go out on the boat and dive every few days, it’ll be a dream job!
OK, so you’ve probably been able to tell from the recent blog posts that we love Belize. When we decided last fall to come to this country, I said we needed to learn how to dive because it has some of the best diving in the world. Indeed!
Thanks to our friend Melanie McKinley for insisting that we take diving instruction with Jay Elson, tortugadivertraining.com. First of all, he lives about half a block from us, and secondly, our boys were college roommates. Most importantly, he is an amazing instructor. Our other amazing instructor, Steve Mosier, is a Montessori teacher and, thankfully, has the patience of Job. When I was ready to give up during training and just crash to the bottom of the pool, Steve stuck with me and got me through the buoyancy struggle. He would have been so proud of me and my buoyancy control today. It was awesome!
There are about a dozen dive shops here on Ambergris Caye. After talking with many folks, we ended up diving with Chuck and Robbie’s Scuba Diving and Instruction, http://www.ambergriscayediving.com/. Kind of a long story, but follow along here: A dear friend from Los Alamos, Phil Jacobson, has a brother, Steve, who owns a bar here in Ambergris Caye called Lola’s Pub and Grill. We haven’t met Steve yet, but through Phil, he recommended Chuck and Robbie’s. After stopping by to the check out the place our first day in town, we ran into Robbie later that night as we were having dinner at Iguana Juan’s (https://iguanajuans2018.wixsite.com/iguanajuans, which has a great saying on its shirts: “Iguana Juan’s is conveniently located upstairs, of an old building, on a Back Street, on an island in Central America…”) and Robbie told us, because of our connection to Steve, he’d give us the locals discount. How cool is that? Chuck and Robbie’s is also a “Diveaholic Rehab Center,” and since we are well on our way to needing that, it seemed like the place to go.
We did a two-tank dive this morning on the Mesoamerican Reef, first at Mermaid’s Lair and then at Golden Gate Canyons. Getting to the sites was no small chore. The reef serves as a barrier that protects the Caye from wind and waves. Once you hit the reef, the swells can top six feet. It was windy today, and the boat slammed into the water a couple of times, but Captain Phillipe got us through (and we didn’t get seasick this time!).
We were diving with a family of five from San Francisco who had just gotten certified this week, a couple of older guys who go to hang out with Robbie and Chuck’s guys, and our dive leader, “Lloyd-y.”
Words fail to describe the life, the colors, the vibrancy, the variety. We swam with a couple of turtles and lots of sharks and fish way too numerous to count. There were blue fish and purple corals and all manner of green sea plants and yellows and browns and stripes and polka dots and rainbows. We saw parrot fish and grouper and jacks and a glassy-eyed snapper and the brightest of bright blue fish in all shapes and sizes. Staghorn and elkhorn and brain corals and underwater castles and so many, many more (I still find the purple corals and sea fans the most amazing and mesmerizing.) The photos and video below are a small representation of some of the largest things we saw (photo credits to Bob, who is starting to get the hang of this underwater photo thing — I just wish the camera could pick up the colors better. [Oh, and the date is wrong. These were taken June 8, not 9]).
I call this Your Brain on Coral 
Turtle! 
Little fish 
Nurse shark close up 
Nurse shark swimming alongside 
Nurse shark swimming below 
Two nurse sharks swimming nearby
During our surface interval (the mandatory time between dives so too much nitrogen doesn’t build up on our blood), I saw a couple of whip-tail string rays from the dock. They were big and fat and apparently come in to catch scraps from the fishermen.
I was more relaxed on our second dive than any dive I’ve been on so far. It showed — I didn’t use nearly as much air as usual, and I could move up or down at will just using my breath (a very cool and proper thing in scuba). It’s fun to get up close to guppy-sized fish darting in and out of coral, look into dark nooks for critters, get close enough to touch a shark (I did not touch it though!), swim in schools various kinds of fish. At one point, I had five nurse sharks swimming underneath me. It’s comforting to know that nurse sharks don’t have feeding frenzies!
So, will I really end up working at a dive shop in Belize? We have many adventures planned for the next several years, but it could just happen. If it does, you’ll find me drinking a mojito a Lola’s or sitting out on the dock, looking up at birds and down at rays and crabs.