Week 2 in Mexico! (sorry it´s a bit late!)

My apologies for not writing a blog last weekend. I was run down from lack of sleep (due to heat and humidity, not choice, I promise you!) and came down with a cold, which kept me from almost all activities for the whole weekend. Granted, this gave me more time to write, but I was in a fairly foul mood for being left out of so many things, that I realized I needed to step back from the blog, lest I write something I might regret later.

Happily I am well again aside from a tiny lingering cough, so I can return to once again regale you with tales from Pez Maya, Mexico. I hope you are enjoying the blog...please let me know if there is anything in particular you would like to hear more about!

My second week here in Mexico had me focusing primarily on completing my Advanced Open Water training. This requires 5 special dives beyond my Open Water training from last week. The first was a Boat Dive, which was truly no different than my previous dives. They simply make it a category of dive, since you could have been diving from docks or from the beach. The second was a Naturalist Dive that involved searching out and recording different species of fish and coral and algae and correctly identifying them later on--a bit of a precurser to my work later on during this expedition. My third dive was called Peak Performance Buoyancy. It required us to swim through smallish hoops without touching the side (right side up and up side down--much harder than you think, due to the tank on your back). We also had to race our fellow divers underwater, keeping a small floating ball under a spoon as we kicked along. Lastly for that dive, we took our fins off underwater, just to see what it was like. Suffice it to say, we got nowhere fast. The fourth dive was a Navigation Dive, where we learned how to follow bearings under water with a compass, as well as how to judge distances by counting steady fin kicks. The last dive however, was by far the best: the Deep Dive. This is the dive that certifies us to be able to dive down to 100 feet, or 30 meters. We went to a particularly deep site called ¨Special K¨ (don´t ask me why, even the staff doesn´t know). As we descended, I swear it felt like another world. You loose the ability to see the color red, the deeper you go, then orange, then yellow and so forth. At our depth, it was mostly just red and some orange that were totally off. Our instructor pulled out a tomato, and I swear the outside was purple and the inside was green. I´ve been told blood also looks like a very dark green that far underwater, but I promise, that´s not from personal experience! We only had a total of 16 minutes for this dive (as opposed to our normal 40 minutes), otherwise we would run the risk of having to perform a number of safety stops in order to ensure no chance of getting decompression sickness, otherwise known as the bends.

After this dive, I was officially Advanced Open Water certified, and would begin my coral spotting dives. These dives are designed to familiarize us with the way the coral actually looks under water, because many of the pictures in our books don´t do them justice. It´s often very difficult bordering on impossible to tell them apart from photos, so the spot dives become absolutely invaluable in learning to differenciate them, and eventually for passing our coral exams.

At the end of the week, starting on Friday, we had a Turtle Festival in the nearby town of Tulum which I mentioned in my last blog. Adults and children gathered in Tulum to celebrate the end of turtle hatching season. GVI provided a host of childrens´games designed to educate them on the local species of turtles as well as how to protect the them from beach pollution. Did you know that turtles lay between 60 and 120 eggs at a time? And that they´ve been around for over 120 million years? And that they can live over 100 years old? And that of the 4 species of marine turtles that live in the area, only 1 is an herbivore? (the Green Turtle! big surprise) And that of the 7 species of marine turtle in the world, that Mexico as a whole has 6 that visit her shores? Anyway...the games went over very well, and my Spanish got quite the kickstart as well. Trying to communicate was often frustrating and slow, but the children were patient, and by the end of the night, I was forgetting myself, and asking our base manager what we were going to eat for dinner in Spanish instead of English.

That about brings me to my falling ill and fairly foul mood. Most everyone in my expedition went out on Friday and Saturday nights, and I stayed in, hoping that some extra sleep would speed my recovery from my cold. Hopefully I´ll get to make up for it this weekend! I´ll try to finish up my second blog tomorrow, so you all can get fully caught up on the goings on here in Mexico. Another apology--my camera has been dead all week, so I haven´t been able to take, nor load any pictures. I´ll do my best to charge it for tomorrow though!

Hasta luego mis amigos! Check back tomorrow for (cross your fingers) another update!