Well, after a very long, cold winter, I decided to pamper myself with a weekend away diving down in Belize with Belize Diving Services.
Chip and the gang run a well oiled machine, with a few boats, lots of tanks, Helium and the quest for adventure!
I picked a 5 day weekend after working many weeks straight through for this trip. Helium isn’t cheap!
Dive God Ilya and Darryl kept me busy and entertained underwater as we hit the usual classic sites up by San Pedro, Turneffe, and out front at Caye Caulker. Of course I ended up getting too much sun the first day, and spent the next few days trying to keep from further burning too much. The drysuit helped quite a bit, but still adds some harsh tan lines.
The first day was spent out at San Pedro, we hopped off the boat doing recreational dives, making sure the new camera rig works, and getting into the swing of things.
Sadly, Sputnik still wasn’t happy, but was a most awesome base for the GoPro to shine this weekend. The mass of Sputnik made most of the camera moves nice and smooth, and made any shakes almost unnoticeable. Turns out, that I forgot to pack the extension port ring for the WA lens … oops!
The second day, on the recommendation of Chip to take the scooters out for a rip along Black Coral Wall at Turneffe, we did some technical diving, hitting 52m and racking up ~30 minutes of deco on each dive. We were fortunate to come across a squadron of Eagle Rays that didn’t mind us on our noisy scooters, breathing noisy bubbles as they cruised the reef edge. We spent most of our deco following and slowly catching up to them. Getting right up beside them (close enough to reach out for a Hi-Five!)
The second dive, we found out some of the limitations of the scooters, but had a blast none the less getting back to the boat.
Later that night, we headed out for a night dive in the Marine Reserve. Quite a bit of activity, with Parrot fish cocooned away in their protective slime, puffers and lion fish out and about. Stingrays relaxing in the sand, while Hermit Crabs are sifting through it for tasty nuggets and lobsters patrolling around.
The last day of diving, we went shallower (38m) and cruised around the reefs of Caye Caulker, finishing off the dives on oxygen to decompress.
Overall, a great weekend of diving with great people and friends.
Bottom Time: 5h49min
Deco Time: 1h33min
Run Time: 7h22min
Still working on the final draft of the trip video, but this isn’t too horrible.
The flights to and from, were my usual dreaded IAH bound flights with United. They won a few of the battles, as did I. I managed to fly back in business class for the same price as what my luggage would cost! Not a bad deal at all (making up for the baggage fee’s on the incoming flights).
I updated my version of FCPX to the newer 10.3 and with the new tools, I’m slowly finding out how I really should be using the program. Although, between the copy I uploaded and the result at Vimeo, it ended up being crushed quite a bit, and ended up with a purple hue. Oh well.