Today Emily went and finished her Free diving class and I went jet skiing for almost two hours. It went back about 10 minutes early because I wasn’t sure of the time and I was feeling pretty done by then.

After lunch I had a 2:00 dive, it was okay. I’m supposed to have a private dive master but I didn’t get one. I still went and really missed my private dive master. I will have to ask about that tomorrow morning. We did a drift dive where you go with the current and then the boat comes and gets you. I have done that a fair amount in Costa Rica. Most of the dives here have been swim out from the boat and then back to the boat after exploring the reef. Not as much stuff to see as my dive yesterday when I forgot my camera, but I did get some pictures.

I have at least two dives tomorrow, Emily is up for snorkeling at least one of those. We will see how things go in the morning.

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Be safe!

Howdy readers!!

So short post tonight, I forgot my camera this morning until I was on the boat. Normally I don’t take much but today I had a bag because I needed to log my dives. Also I had my camera in my mask pouch yesterday but I took it out last night to get the pictures for last night’s post and left it on the table. So when I looked in the pouch it wasn’t there.

My first dive today was the deep dive!! I went down to 102 feet. I wasn’t there for very long as your bottom time is shorter due to the possibility of gas bubbles forming in your body and then you end up with problems. There wasn’t much there anyway. There was however at between 40-50 feet quite a bit today, there was a very large crab, a few lobsters and a small eel bed with a lot of little eels. Of course plenty of fish. For sea life it was a good dive and I didn’t get the bends.

My second dive was a naturalist specialization, which we were looking at corals mostly but also got to see some eagle rays and a turtle. I was informed it is mating season for the rays and they start to bunch up.

After my second dive my class was complete and I am now advanced open water certified. I suppose if there is a time or place where deeper water is where everything is to see I can go. I don’t think it will be very often but I have it.

Tomorrow I will be jet skiing with Kevin’s tour company in the morning. Emily is doing more free diving. In the afternoon we are going out with Splash Inn, I will dive and Emily will snorkel and practice her free diving skills.

Hopefully everyone is doing well!!

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?

I did my first free diving class today, and it went great! I was concerned about how it would go, but I’m actually a decent free diver. I think my snorkeling background helped. I was most concerned about equalizing the pressure in my ears, which has limited how far I could dive in the past. There is a special technique that free divers use. It’s different than the scuba diving technique. It’s faster and works better at deeper depths. I had practiced some before I got here, and I found the technique fairly easy. I’m glad I practiced ahead of time though. I can dive to 39 ft without much trouble, and I think I was down to 49 ft once today.

We did two types of free diving today. In the first method, you pull yourself down with a rope attached to a weight. This was easiest for me. The second method involved swimming down with fins. I don’t have much experience using fins. I don’t like them so I don’t use them when I snorkel. I had a hard time controlling them, but to dive deep, you really have to use them so I need to start practicing with them.

There was one other guy who took the class with me today. He struggled with equalization and was pretty frustrated, but he’s going to take some Sudafed and see if that helps tomorrow. He’s 28 and recently quit his job and is planning to spent the next year or two traveling the world and blowing through most of his savings while he tries to decide what he really wants to do. One of the other free divers on the trip had done the same things when he was younger. He took 4 years to travel and live off savings. Both of them work in tech. My dive instructor was from Argentina.

I have my second day of class tomorrow morning. I hope it’s less windy and the water is calmer. We were out for at least 2 hours today. The water was pretty choppy and I was starting to feel mildly seasick by the time we came in. My sunscreen didn’t work as well as usual and I have weird sunburn patches all over. They aren’t bad burns, but I’ll have a weird tan.

But, overall, I was really happy with how the day went. Bill and I ate at a good restaurant down the street. The food here overall, is really good. I’m thirsty a lot and the smoothies and lemonade are delicious!

Hello readers!! Hopefully everyone is ready for summer and has been getting along well!

We’re once again in Roatan, Emily’s post yesterday should have clued everyone in. Even with the Urgent Care visit and subsequent fallout from that (more on that later!) we did enjoy our time in Roatan and decided to comeback.

Emily is doing the hands on portion of her free diving course starting tomorrow and I will be finishing my Advanced Open Water course. I have four dives with skills to do for my hands on portion. This certification will allow me to dive to 130 feet though they recommend another course to dive at that level and suggest that 100 feet is recreational diving limit. As you dive deeper there is more things to consider and watch for. You get more dissolved gasses in your body and you can spend less time down. For the most part I just want the certification more so than to dive deeper all the time. I do find the 30-60 foot range to be where I usually get to dive anyway. Also your tanks last longer in shallower water. I would rather have as much time under than go deep.

Since we have been here before we are not sure what we will get for pictures. I don’t think there was a lot last time either. I should get some dive photos, if they let me during my certification dives.

So more on my Urgent Care visit, the billing company for Unimed submitted a bill for $4500 + and my insurance did come to an agreement with them for the majority of it. As for what was left I have no idea what they’re doing because I haven’t heard from them since the insurance company paid them. So for soaking my foot in cleaning closet vinegar and scratching at a couple spines with a needle someone got paid well. When we were at the Urgent Care they charged a $400 deposit and said that the bill was going to be around $400 and that’s why they charged that much for a deposit.

Today we stopped by the excursion place where we booked the snorkeling and tours last year and they took us down to Urgent Care and they were going to find out why it was so much. I have a feeling they don’t know what the billing company is doing but they may. Anyhow we have to go back tomorrow when there will be someone who is in charge of things like that. Kevin from the excursion company is going to take us. Sounds like he knows the person who runs it. So that should be interesting! Maybe we’ll find out if Unimed gets a cut of that insurance money or not.

Hello All! Bill and I arrived back in Roatan around 12:30pm today. We visited here last May too. We had to get up at 2:45am to make our 5am flight but overall, we had a smooth travel day. Flights lately have been terrible. A lot of them have 24 or 48 hour layovers somewhere or they are crazy early in the morning. We don’t know why.

We flew through Miami, which is my least favorite airport that we go through. The bathrooms are packed and there was a line, there isn’t enough seating, the food options aren’t great, and something is usually broken. Today it was the sky train. It’s also a really noisy airport.

The nice thing about Roatan is that its only about 2 hours from Miami so it’s one of the quicker places to get to and our apartment isn’t very far from the airport. We had a really nice taxi driver who I was able to practice Spanish with.

Our apartment is beautiful! It’s even nicer than last time. We have 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a full kitchen and a living room. The living room has a nice love seat and a full sofa. It’s also beautifully built and decorated. The showers are huge and the bathrooms are tiled in a very pretty ocean-inspired tile. I have pictures below.

Bill took a nap after we got here and I read for a while. We were pretty tired and it was hot out. We left around 5pm to get food at a really nice restaurant down the street. Bill got half a roasted chicken and I had fish sticks. The fish sticks are good ones, they aren’t like the crappy ones that come out of a box at home. Overall, the food is good here. We also picked up a few groceries from a little store close to our apartment so we at least have breakfast food. We swam for a while in the pool after we got back. I’m running out of energy pretty fast now.

We don’t have anything planned for tomorrow, which is nice. Friday and Saturday, Bill is doing an advanced open water scuba class, and I’m taking a free diving class. We both need to go to our respective dive schools tomorrow and make sure everything is set up. We also have several days of diving and snorkeling booked. It’s the low season here right now and it’s pretty empty. That makes it easy to book things and we have the pool mostly to ourselves.

I’m done for tonight! Hope you are all doing well!

Today is our last full day at Lagoon Resort and Apartments. We need to go pay my dive tab and deal with the plus, our air conditioning for the time at Lagoon. They give a room rate but in their app they inform you that air conditioning is extra. We didn’t get the app until after we were here since we don’t just add a bunch of apps. The app also wasn’t that useful for us either. I understand that A/C can be expensive but add it to the room rate up front. they have meters on the units but ours hasn’t changed since we got here. The woman we spoke to this morning said that we won’t get charged for A/C since it didn’t track it. So that’s a plus. We are spending that money on gas for the rental as we didn’t find the closest gas station.

We have a few more pictures from our trip.

Well today is the last full day of this vacation. Overall it wasn’t bad, we’ve had better diving and snorkeling, my dive days were the days for being in the water. I really enjoyed my dives. Karl was very helpful and I got good practice with buoyancy and air consumption. I am good with 12 lbs of weight which isn’t bad, Karl uses 10. 52 minutes on a regular tank puts me in the same as most of the better divers I have dove with in the past.

There were some things we didn’t like about here, walking around where we stayed isn’t a thing. In the capital there would be more but then more people as well.

Needing a car, added expense to get around, scooters are cheaper and means things are closer and easy to find.

Food was better when we cooked than the restaurant here at the hotel. It was okay but expensive for what it was. The kitchen was small and probably could use a couple more pans. Not a lot of options and everything was a bit more expensive than other places. The only local food offered was a stew. Seems they eat a lot of stew and bread.

People mostly kept to themselves which can be a positive, but we do like to have a conversation with locals and they definitely kept to themselves. We did meet some folks from North Carolina. Karl was probably the most talkative person but we also spent the most time together.

If we were to come back here we would stay further east on the edge of the capital, probably the other side, there are some places there where there is supposed to be more coral and the ships that are there for diving are closer. I don’t see it happening but it may. I think we would still need a car and that’s a hassle.

I don’t know if it’s a complaint but the pool is 5 foot 7 inches deep, I can stand up in it but not Emily. There are two sets of stairs and two corners that have a place you can sit a couple people but otherwise it 5’7” deep.

They do allow smoking in the open air dining areas, I don’t know about closed areas. I don’t care for that while I’m eating.

The weather was perfect okay, it is the rainy season and it did rain some. It never really interfered with anything for us. Temps were good around 84 with a breeze. Sometimes very breezy. Slightly humid. A lot more greenery here than expected with that humidity.

I don’t have a strong urge to go back home tomorrow so that’s a good sign that we had a good vacation. I won’t be disappointed though either that I am going back home tomorrow. It was a relaxing vacation with good practice dives. Emily and I got to do some snorkeling and had time to not be caught up in regular home stuff.

We are partially packed. Our flight doesn’t leave until 3:30 tomorrow afternoon so we will have until lunchtime to finish up. It will be a late night getting back to St Louis but that’s normal.

Hopefully you have enjoyed our blog posts. We are going to probably try mainland Belize again but on the beach next time. We are hoping to combine both elements of what we enjoyed the last time in Belize without the long boat ride to the islands. But nothing is settled yet. There is some discussion about some classes we both want to do, Emily would like to do a free diving class and I am going to get my advanced open water. I will need it and a specialty to be a Master Diver when I get to 50 dives. I’m sitting at 29 so it’s coming up probably in the next few vacations.

I’m also thinking about a solo diver course then I would just get gear and tanks and go out with Emily as she snorkels and free dives.

Be good or at least good at it!

Hello All: It’s been several days since I did a post and now I don’t remember what I wanted to say. I started a post last night that I didn’t finish and now I can’t find the draft. We are having a fine time here in Curacao, but it’s not our most exciting trip and I don’t take any pictures, so I haven’t had a lot to post. Bill’s posts are better since he has the pictures.

There are a variety of very colorful birds here and it’s fun to watch them from the balcony in the morning. The palm tree beside the balcony is full of tiny, yellow birds called Bananaquits. The name refers to their color, not their food preference. I put some bananas out for them the other day but they weren’t interested. They are slightly larger than hummingbirds with long tongues and are also nectarivores.

There is also a bright orange bird called a Venezuelan Troupial that comes to the balcony in the morning and a variety of bright green hummingbirds.

On Sunday, we visited the Hato Caves. I like caves and this one had bats hanging from the ceiling so that was a nice trip. The bats eat primarily fruit here although they may also be nectarivores. Something ate the bananas that the Bananaquits turned down so maybe the bats came and ate them. I put out some pieces of mango this evening, so I’ll see what happens with that. I have not seen any raccoons or coatis or even rodents here, which is surprising. There probably is some variety of rodent, but I’m surprised that there are no raccoons.

Overall, the snorkeling and diving have not been great, but we did a fun night dive/snorkel a few nights ago. I swam above the divers and it worked out great. They had their lights on so I hardly needed to use mine at all and I could see everything they were seeing. I need to take a free diving course so I can learn how to equalize the pressure in my ears and stay down longer. Once I get so far down, my head feels like it’s going to pop like a balloon and the suction in my goggles gets really tight.

The water here has bioluminescent creatures, which is awesome! After I swam away from the divers, I turned my light off and swam in the dark. There was a full moon so I still had plenty of light, but every time I move my hands through the water, I hit the little bioluminescent creatures. They light up when you hit them, and it looked like sparkles were coming off my fingers. It was spectacular! I’m hoping to do one more night snorkel if the weather is better tomorrow. It stormed last night and today so the visibility in the water was bad today.

Yesterday, we went to a location with turtles. The turtles are super fun to watch but there were also a lot of people who were in the way.

Overall, I haven’t been that impressed with the food here, but I have had some good fish and shrimp. Bill and I shared a brownie and a piece of apple pie for lunch and both of those were pretty good. We also made some pretty good fettuccini last night for supper and my fruit salads have been delicious! I’m really going to miss the mangos when I go home. If you are a strict vegetarian this would be a hard place to come. The menus are meat-heavy. If you are vegan, I’m not sure what you would get except for lettuce salads. If you like goat meat, this would be a good place for you.

Tomorrow, we need to clean up our rental car and get gas so we can return it on Thursday morning. We don’t have any activities planned but I’ll try to night snorkel if the weather is good. We had people recommend a restaurant down the road so we might try that too. This has not been my favorite vacation but it’s freezing in Iowa so I’m not really looking forward to going back to that either!

Well readers I have gotten 29 open water dives for a little over 20 hours underwater. I also have two Discover Scuba dives as well. Karl was an excellent dive master. Peter and Jason also did well.

I got 52 minutes out of a regular 12l. tank for my last dive using the 12 lbs of weight I normally use. I was a little light at the end of the dive but was still able to stick to the bottom. I also am leaving plenty of air in the tank above the minimum. This trip has been a little confusing as I was using Bar instead of PSI for how much air I had. I’m a little better at it. I probably should stick to PSI.

Both dives today were at new locations and were fairly good. A little more reef than other places we have been. The first one was where the fishermen toss out the remains of their catch and it brings the turtles in. We did get to see three different turtles. That place was a zoo of people.

It sort of feels like the trip is winding down but we still have two full days and part of a 3 before we fly home. We will probably do some snorkeling or swimming at a minimum the next couple and there is a restaurant Emily would like to go to.

It’s a fair number of pictures today! I have included my dive buddy Josh from my first dive today and Karl.

Karl said Emily does really well free diving, she gets down around 7 meters/21 feet. Some of the dives here are pretty shallow and Emily can see pretty much the same things as the divers. I do both and I think if possible I would always scuba dive.

I will have to see about getting my advanced open water certification next. Double the depth. I would have enjoyed doing it with Karl as my instructor. Not sure here is where I want to do it though.

After my advanced certification I will do a some specialty classes and then maybe after I hit 50 dives I can be a Master Diver.

Remember if you sign up for email delivery of the blog you will get them as soon as they publish!! Otherwise look for more posts because I don’t always send everyone links. It’s hard to remember who got one and who didn’t. I’m on vacation so that’s a lot like work!

Be good or at least good at it!

Hello blog post reader! Hopefully you are enjoying our blog, some times it is more interesting than others. Today we took the car and drove down to Willemstad to visit the Kato Cave. The Kato cabe got its name from the Kato plantation which is also how the airport got its name as it sits on a good portion of the plantation. For those that are not familiar with the Dutch Trading Company, they were heavy in the slave trade and used Curaçao as a stopping off point before taking slaves onto their final destination and were also used on the island. There is some residual dislike we will say of the Dutch by the people of darker skin tone here on the island. Dive master Jason said he thought when he first got here it was a “white/black thing” but after people figured out he was American they were much more friendly. The cave was where slaves as you can imagine didn’t enjoy being slaves would run away from the Kato plantation and hide. They were eventually found and the cave was closed off with a gate that is still there and used today which I found odd that it was left in place. There were some bats in the cave, the bats here are fruit bats. The cave system is quite large but they only have a small portion that is accessible for tourists. They did not excavate any of the natural cave to put in walk ways. They did run electricity for lighting and fans. The cave system is actually very warm and at a higher level than a lot of the island. It’s higher than the Queen Juliana Bridge.

I said I would have some pictures, so here are some!!

We tried to go to a Sunday market, we found where it was supposed to be but they must not do it there anymore if at all. Kind of disappointing. It was a lot of driving through the capital metropolitan area. The like their KFC, Pizza Hut, Burger King, McDonalds and NAPA here in the capital, there are multiple of each.

This afternoon end up being kind of a lazy day as Emily got a bit of a headache, some rain, occasionally pretty heavy came through and I was just tired from all the sun. We had lunch at a restaurant Emily likes and then we took it easy until the evening.

After a light dinner I had a night dive lined up and Emily joined us for snorkeling.

The dive went well, I figured out that my BCD is trapping air and that I have way too much weight, it is also why I tend to be more face down oriented when I’m diving. I got another 60 minute dive with a good 500 left at the end. Karl said I have good air consumption and buoyancy. I think I do okay for only going for a handful of dives a couple times per year.

There was more creatures out tonight, a big green eel some lion fish and a fair number of lobsters. We didn’t see any octopus which Karl had been seeing on his night dives.

I have a couple more dives to do tomorrow so we’ll see what happens on those. Hopefully the new areas will provide some more to look at. I think Karl mentioned there may be a sculpture garden at Alice in Wonderland and we will go where the turtles like to hang out. Hopefully there will be some!