Today Emily did the first day of her class and it sounds like it went well and she is happy with her success!
I did three dives today, first was the fish finder dive where I work on my skills identifying sea life. Most of what I seen was mostly the same fish. I didn’t get to see the shark the other divers doing a recreation dive did because we were off actively looking for stuff. I also didn’t see the turtles and eel on the last dive. I did see a baby angel fish and flounder.
I got a few pictures, I didn’t get to use my camera much.
My second dive was navigation. I got to do some drills in the water and then I led the way back to the boat, I over shot our turn because a lot of the reef looks the same and I didn’t know how far we had gone. It was okay though because my instructor knew where we were going. I knew the direction and if I could have gone over the reef I would have ran into the boat from my starting position. The reef was too shallow and she didn’t allow me to go in a straight line for where the boat was. There was enough water for swimming and being under but she said boats come through sometimes and the. The safety margin is too narrow.
My third dive was peak buoyancy control. I do fairly well with my buoyancy especially when swimming. Hovering is still a little bit of an issue. We may try me with less weight than the normal 12 pounds that I use. I have a delay when I breathe in before I start to rise. Exhaling and I go down fairly quickly. It’s odd. I had some skills to do for that dive as well. I had to swim through a hoop several times, sometimes flipping to face the surface. She said that skill is for cave diving, I told her that then won’t be something I need to be good at, I’m not going to be cave diving. I also did the knock a scuba weight over deal Karl had me doing in Curaçao when he worked with me on my buoyancy. I don’t do a lot of head down diving but I can see the use for looking under ledges at crabs and lobsters.
Tomorrow I will do my deep dive and a naturalist dive.
After diving I went down with Kevin from the tour shop and we talked to the billing gal and she literally said that they know the bills get marked up some because the insurance takes a long time to pay and then they don’t pay all of it sometimes. She did also say that normally it is around $400 and that $4500 is a lot. She took a copy of the bill to show her boss and they will be in contact. She did say they were no longer using that billing company ( not sure if that is true) and that they are looking at a rule where everyone that comes to Roatan has to have travel insurance and that would be the only insurance they would deal with. We get travel insurance and that would have been the next step if my insurance didn’t pay. I don’t know if going there will change anything but maybe it would help someone. I told Kevin to tell his clients going forward to not say they have health insurance and just pay the deposit then deal with any bill when they get home. Kevin said you can get a nice car for $5000 in Roatan, Nelson his number 2 said you can have somebody taken out for that kind of money here. I wonder if they would go out a take care of the sea urchins?
Traveling with Emily! 