Week 3! (on time!!)

This week, all of the expedition members were happy to discover that the weather had cooled to livable, breathable, sleepable levels over the weekend while we were away at the turtle festival. I actually got to wear my sweatshirt for the first time that Sunday evening. Being able to sleep quite well for at least 2 nights in a row certainly did wonders for my health and mood. Sadly the increased wind which was helping to cool us all down also made it impossible to dive for three full days. This was quite unfortunate for my divemaster progress, but I am still assured by staff that I will be able to complete it within the 10 week period. Strangely enough, even though I was not able to dive for those three days, I was still in a much better mood than I had been all weekend. I think it largely has to do with having the right perspective, and consciously choosing my current situation, over and over again. I chose to be here 3 weeks ago, and now, this morning, as I wake up, I am still choosing it. I´ll choose to be here at dinner tonight, and when I wake up tomorrow. If I choose not to be here, I´ll leave. But til then, I just need to keep realizing that this is my choice, and make the most of my amazing time here. No more grumpy moods!

So, while we couldn´t dive, we managed to put up a volleyball net. We were inspired so much by beach volleyball that we just had to pick Top Gun as our weekly Sunday night movie this week. Also, I passed my coral exam! Took me about 5 tries, which I gather is just about average (some of those pictures are very very tricky!!). We also became certified in Emergency First Response (basically CPR and First Aid training). Lastly, we also had a special tutorial that qualified us to be certified O2 (Oxygen) Providers (often administered when divers show signs of decompression illness, after CPR, or for victims who have gone into shock, to name a few).

We finally got to dive again on Thursday, thought the waves were still quite choppy, and the visibility was absolutely terrible. Three meters away, you´d pretty muchg loose sight of your buddy. Coral spots were difficult, and to top it all off, I had some lingering effects from my cold that gave me some pain when descending, right across the top of my head in my sinuses. That made diving very frustrating, but each dive gets better as my cold disappears completely. Friday was much better for visibility and reminded me once again how amazing diving can be. We were at a site called Oasis which has a fairly steep dropoff, and I was given a bit of free time while the dive leader concentrated on spots for a different pair of divers. Just hanging there, suspended at the edge of a reef dropoff, perfectly neutrally buoyant...is an experience that just defies description. I floated, and somersaulted, and twisted in place. I saw fish darting in and out of coral, and then a large school swims right around me, and continues on as if I weren´t even there. I cannot adequately describe how truly magical it is.

Saturday we are allowed a fun dive, where we leave our dive leaders back on base, and dive on our own (but always in pairs!). It was fun to be able to choose our own sites, and swim where we wanted to go. My buddy and I didn´t see much in the way of rays or sharks or eels, which we were hoping for, but we did see some pretty massive schools of fish, including some gray angelfish that are apparently rarely seen in large groups. I wish I had pictures to show you, but most of the dives I´ve been on have been deeper than 10 meters and thus, I can´t bring my camera along. I also still don´t have any other pictures for you because I still haven´t managed to charge it. (I promise, I´ll have something for you next week!)

That´s about it so far! This coming week, we should be beginning our Rescue Diving course, as well as learning about survey techniques, so that hopefully sometime the week after, we´ll begin doing actual coral surveys. The standards for identification and techniques are quite high so that the data we retrieve can never be in question, thus it takes quite a while before we are all deemed ready to collect that data on our surveys. The project we´re involved in provides two sets of data: one from our sites, which are protected areas, as well as data from Mahahual, an area south of the Sian Kaán Biosphere, that is unprotected. This way, we can present data that hopefully shows the positive effects of protecting areas to the Mexican government, as well as try to get through to them what all of their highly destructive cruise ship and spring break tourism is doing to the coral reefs.

That´s all for this week! Stay tuned for my update on Week 4 (dear god, has it been 4 weeks already??) next week!