Utila dive-a-thon!

March 3, 2011
We have been learning to scuba dive for the past 4 days! We signed up to do out Open Water Scuba Diver course through the Utila Dive Centre. There was a bunch of class time and skills tests, 2 confined dives and 4 open water dives off the boat. Utila is supposed to be the cheapest place in the world to learn how to dive. Everyone who is here is here to dive and if not its to stay on some of the private islands they have here. $100 a night and you can stay on your own island in a cabana. We just finished the course today. Chad is hooked and now wants to do his advanced course. I was unfortunate enough to be cursed with narrow ear tubes and have some crazy pain when resurfacing. I have to go really really slow when coming up but even then it still hurts like hell. Everyone else had more trouble equalizing going down, that part was good for me. Once I'm down there and past a certain depth, like 8 or 10 meters its great and and I love feeling weightless!! The fish are so cool when you actually get to stop and look at them and hang out on the bottom with them for a while. Our first dive was at a place called Little Bight and the corral was colourful and the fish plentiful. We went to 12 meters. The second dive was at a place called Black Corral Wall and that's what it was...a corral wall that we dove beside. We went to 16 meters there. Today we dove at Ted's Point and Moon Hole. They were both beautiful. The surface was a little rougher so got a few mouthfull's of seawater. Finished off all the skills and did some backflips and handstands on the bottom to celebrate our newfound scuba certification! Our instructor was so patient and helpful. The divemasters were cool too but our school is a teaching facility and so we each had a divemaster following us around trying to help us get our buoyency right and help us to equalize and go up. After a while I was getting a little sick of them grabbing me by the tank and putting me where they wanted me and pressing my buttons and all those frickin hand signals were nuts! We have two fun dives booked for tomorrow and I'm looking forward to them but my ears are not. I tried so hard to go as slow as absolutely possible when coming up but my ears still had a "squeeze" and i couldn't even function for about a minute because it hurt so bad and I couldn't hear. So ya no advanced diving for me I guess, which really sucks because every other part of diving is so awesome. I think I inherited my mom's ears...she has issues even driving to the mountains.
Other than diving Utila is a pretty nice little town. The food here is great. We go to RJ's BBQ every mon, wed and fri for grilled fish! Tonight we are going to the Driftwood Restaurant with our instructors to celebrate our PADI certs. There was a beach BBQ pig roast on the second night we were here and we went to have a plate. When we got there the sand flies ate us alive and there was no pig roasting...it apparently was cooked earlier and was in cardboard boxes. The dude dished us up with his bare hands pulling out the pig portions from the nasty greasy box. It was pretty frickin gross and I had an instant stomach ache. We gave the rest to the dogs and high taled it back to RJ's for some good food. Our friend from the sailing trip, Mike from England, was especially covered in sand fly bites. He is also doing the dive course with us aswell as a girl from Ohio named Jackie. We've been pretty hard on the budget these past few days....after diving beer and good food are always in order. No cooking for us yet. We are in dorms however. Chad and I try to make our room look as unwelcoming as possible in order to keep out intruders! Each dorm only sleeps four but its nice for us to have the room to ourselves. This french girl with an English accent stayed for two nights. Chad and I had took both the bottom bunks and we clearly had our stuff on our beds. She went over to my bed and put her stuff on it and proceeded to pull out a loaf of white bimbo (that's a brand name here) bread and mow down a few slices. I politely told her that my stuff and my sheets were on that bed and she said "oh that's ok". So I politely asked her "soo...um...which bed do you want?" she said "this one if you don't mind" i said "well I did sleep there last night and that is all of my stuff and my sheets so ya i guess you can i just need to move all of my stuff." she said "yes, thankyou". So she effectively and politely stole my bed....bugger.
March 4, 2011
We are now officially certified open water divers....not sure if I ever want to dive again but at least I can say that I can if I want to! My ears are not feeling any better. We have two fun dives to do today at 1 but I really don't know if I can do it. Last night to celebrate we went out to the Driftwood restaurant and I had a porkchop the size of my head! Chad an entire half of chicken. Not sure what we plan on doing for the rest of our time on Utila. Chad was thinking of doing the advanced course and did some shopping around at schools last night. He still doesn't know. After the Driftwood we went to the Tranquila Bar. We met two girls from Edmonton there. They both work on Whyte Ave. One at Filthy McNasty's and the other at Black Dog. Small world. They both bartend during the summers and roll in the dough and take the winter and travel. Last year Thailand, this year Central America. Meeting so many Canadians on this trip. People have been raving about Costa Rica like crazy so I 'm getting excited to head there soon.
March 5, 2011
3 fun dives down with no ear squeeze!! I decided I wasn't going to skip my fun dives just because of a little ear pain. The pain always went away so whatever. I'm so glad that I didn't skip them because my ears were great and I saw so much cool stuff. Our first two dives yesterday we did in the afternoon. I really like one called Labarynth. It was like a maze through the corral. It was like swimming through canyons of corral. Saw some lobsters and all sorts of fish. Went out with the boat afterwards to try to find some whale sharks but they have been eluding us so far. You have to look for a big flock of birds dive bombing the surface to find them. The birds are eating all the plankton and shrimps that get sent to the surface when the sharks are eating. We saw some pictures that one of the divemasters took and they look enormous! Hopefully we will be able to see one. The dives we did today were pretty cool too. We went out with the morning boats in hopes that we could do the dives and then look for some whale sharks again but no such luck. We did see a pod of spinner dolphins and a sea turtle though! We found a lionfish too. There were a couple of people on the boat who were hunting them. They are actually foriegn to the carribean and are becoming a big problem so people are going out and spearing them and leaving the dead fish around to teach the other fish to start eating them. Becuase they are foreign there have no natural predators so they are multiplying like crazy. 60,000 eggs in one week per female. They are super poisonous too. They are normally found in Thailand and other asian countries but they have a couple of theories about how they came to the carribean. The first is that an aquarium in Florida was damaged in a hurricaine and the all the fish got swept out to sea and the lionfish just flourished. The other theory is that they came from the ballasts of tanker ships from asia when they pump them out in harbours. Underwater they look black and white and have fins sticking out in every direction and like to hover under rocks. Chad did the second dive today and I snorkeled. He saw a huge fish that no one really knew the name of so they decided to call it the bigfatfish. The snorkeling was crazy and I got to see quite a bit. I took some pics and video of them diving below me. As they were coming back to the boat the pod of dolphins decided to show and up and swim past us. Spinner dolphins are smaller than bottlenose ones and are generally not to curious about divers and tend to swim away. Bottlenose on the other hand will come up to divers and look and them and see what the heck they are and why do they look so funny. I think I am going to be a mermaid when I grow up.
Said goodbye to Mike from England today. He is heading south like we should be but just the effort of packing my bag right now is beyond my capabilities. We are so tired and hot and just wanting to chill for a few more days and let our ears drain! I would like to have dry hair for maybe longer than a couple of hours. Our hotel here is frickin awesome and I am not looking forward to having to leave. They kicked out an American couple because they were not taking the dive course anymore, so hopefully we don't get the boot! I think I know the reason now why people here tend to never leave...its too much of a pain in the ass to get anywhere and the mainland is ugly and busy and poluted.
Creature tally in room: 1 very large spider, 1 very cute lizard, 10,000 mosquitos.