So down to the shop where he helps me get ready and I am first on the boat this morning but there are only 4 divers and two staff. One couple from Port Louis and they come and dive every weekend. The other gentleman will be my buddy. So waving goodbye to my hubby, off we go.
First dive was on Cathedral which is a rock mount with a spire opening in it that you can swim through. There was quite a bit of surface current though and I had to use the boat line to pull myself over to the down anchor line. As I am going down the line, I ran my hand over the back of my tank and cannot feel my tank strap. That's the all important strap that holds your tank onto your life supporting BCD. I knew these fat steel tanks were going to give me trouble. So I supported the tank with my hand so it wouldn't totally fall out to the bottom of the sea and take my regulator and life with it and waited for my dive master. He came on down the anchor line and stopped and gripped my tank and tank strap and jerked it back into place and tightened it up. Support back in place, I continued pulling myself down the anchor line.
The current eased a bit at the bottom so we all left the anchor line and swam off towards the spire to do a swim through of the opening which was quite lovely. There is not a whole lot of coral around but mostly just rock mounts. There were a lot of tiny sea urchins, about the size of a 50p piece and they studded the rocks almost everywhere so I had to be very careful where I touched everything.
We are about 20 minutes into the dive and I see our dive master pointing into the blue (that's the deep open ocean off to whichever direction you can see). I'm looking and looking and not seeing anything. I look at him - he is still pointing so whatever it is, he can still see it. I swim closer to him and have to hold onto a rock outcrop to keep in place because of the current. Finally I see these mammoth, gigantic shapes slowly ghost by us, about 15' away, just barely in the visibility range. Three huge manta rays slowly drift by, not even using their wings to move, just like ghosts. These babies are about 12-15' across the wing tips. I have never seen such rays so huge. It's a magical moment. just super. Had I not been clenching my regulator in my mouth, I sure I would have hung there with my mouth down to my knees they were so magnificent.
They were gone so fast without even trying. I tried to get closer to see them better and get a photo but they had already disappeared. So we start moving on again. The dive master points to me and asks how much air I have left. I have 2000 pounds PSI which is about 3/4 of a tank. Unfortunately, they run on bars so when I signaled I had 2 left, he thought I meant 20 bars which is almost empty. He signals to ascend. Didn't even occur to me that he thought I was low on air. I figure my buddy was low on air so that's why we were going up. We did our safety stop and got out of the water. I mentioned I still had over 1/2 tank left of air so they all got together and stared at my gauge and figured out that our hand signals were different for PSI and Bars and they would henceforth just look at my gauge to see what my air situation was. works for me.
The other couple finally came up as well and we head back to shore but only to get cups so we can drink some juice. Bananas were passed around for a between dive snack and biscuits and then we are going to go back out for our second dive. We had planned to go to Sweet Lips but it was further away so we went to Aquarium instead. First couple goes in and down the line. I'm in and down the line without a problem this time. They changed dive masters so we have a new one but that's ok.
Aquarium didn't have a lot of coral or fish either but nice rock mounts and such. Visibility wasn't that great either. We swam along and saw several different moray eels. Then our dive master found us an anemone that had a couple of glass shrimp on it. These shrimp are about an inch long or smaller so it was nice to see and watch them for a couple of minutes.
I look at my dive computer and see that it is telling me I only have 7 minutes before I have to decompress. I've never done a decompression dive in my life and I've been diving since 1976 (of course there was a 15 year gap in there). So I slowly started ascending, adding time slowly to my ability to stay underwater. When we had been down about 35 minutes, I still have 1/2 tank of air to go but also had now about 20 minutes before I had to decompress but our dive master signaled to go up and do our safety stop. This time, my buddy was getting low on air. So we did our safety stop and I came out at a 40 minute dive with almost 1/2 tank of air left. that's about my average.
I could see the other sausage in the water (a sausage is the air tube you fill underwater and let float up to the surface so that the boat will come to you). I knew the other couple had left us at some point so I figured the boat would pick them up first but they came to us first and we got on board and then piddled around some before going to the other safety sausage and picking up the couple. Later when we are back at the dive shop and cleaning our gear, the lady asks how long I've been diving and such. They are always amazed that we have come this far from the USA until we tell them we live in England and then it's not quite so bad. They've only been diving a year but they live in Port Louis so they come every weekend. It will be nice when we retire and we can go diving every week as well!!!
BUT they had to do a decompression dive because they had been down so deep on their first dive and then went too deep on the second dive. Personally, don't think that's too smart as she said they has 12 minutes to decompress underwater. That's why I always watch my dive computer and try to never get below a 10 minute safety zone before decompression becomes a necessity. Never decompressed and hope never to need to do to but never say never, right?
Anyway, gear clean and hanging to dry and the owner drives me back to the apartment. My hubby had walked down to the beach in Flic en Flac and looked around but said almost everything was closed. We just hung out in the pool and then read our kindles and played on the computer and I kept falling asleep until it was time to go to bed.
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