Good day everyone!! Today I got to do a shore dive! I have to say I like shore diving more than most of my boat dives. I think some weren’t bad but the water was calm and clear. The difference is a boat dive is where they take you out to where you will dive, you put your gear on and then you basically jump out of the boat in the ocean some distance from shore and you dive. Shore diving is just walking into the water from shore with your gear on and you keep going deeper and then you can dive. It’s usually not as deep of a dive but it can be depending where you are. Here, today I went down 11 meters or 33 feet. I’ve been down around 90 feet when I was in Jamaica.
We really didn’t see much, there was a trigger fish, a whip tail stingray and a couple of lobsters hiding in a hole. The reef was neat to swim though and I enjoyed the formations. There was some bleaching of the corals here. Not sure if it is from warmer water or from being touched. The reef in places is pretty shallow and is good for snorkeling from shore. I was unable to get clear shots of the fish and ray due to the clarity of the water.
Punt Uva is a great place to do diving and snorkeling, the dive season is more August through November. It also sounds like there’s some diving a couple other months but Francisco wasn’t as clear about when. He did stay stop by and check “if it okay, we go!”
My dive buddy today was Cedric, he is here from France with his family. Emily got to speak with him in French at lunch after the dive. Cedric hadn’t dove for ten years and he had stopped in and asked about diving this morning and since I chose to do a refresher Francisco asked if it was okay, which I think didn’t matter since he already said he could. It was good with me though, I told Cedric that I hadn’t been getting a lot of down time and I was around fifteen dives so I still needed to work on breathing and buoyancy control. He was good with that since it had been so long since he dove. It also turned out that Cedric was not certified yet as a diver either. He told Francisco after the dive he hadn’t taken his PADI test yet, I seem Francisco’s face kind of curl up like what??? After I said that Cedric probably should have done the Discover Scuba class, it’s like the refresher but a little longer. In the end though Cedric did fine on the skills and we had no problems. I wonder if he had been certified through a different dive organization besides PADI.
Emily snorkeled the whole time I was diving. Today I got 45 minutes on air from the scuba tank. Francisco said that my buoyancy was good, I think I can use more practice, some of that is controlled by your breathing, you take in a deep breath and you will go up and let all the air out and then you sink. I was glad to have a good dive and I would dive with Francisco at Punta Uva Dive Center. He was fantastic!
After the dive we had lunch at the little restaurant connected to the dive shop, we really wanted their burgers as the smelled great but they had run out of buns by the time we got to order. We had pizza, it was okay, a little greasy, they may have drizzled oil on it.
This afternoon we went back after settling our stomachs and rested a bit. The beach there is very good for snorkeling and we wanted to get our tine in the water. Francisco says that the swell is coming probably Sunday and it’s going to be two meters or six feet. He said that it will just come up. I’m not sure what that will do to our water activities. It may shut us out for snorkeling and boogie boards. Hope not.
If it does we have a few other things that we want to do. There is a Jaguar rescue and a chocolate tour with a visit to a waterfall, hopefully that involves swimming. If we are shut out the lack of a good hotel pool will be more of an issue.
Be safe!
Traveling with Emily! 