I love — love! — diving in the Great Lakes. But when the opportunity arose, I had to find out why so many recreational divers rave about the warm waters of the Caribbean. And don’t tell me this doesn’t sound cool: the last week of January, six days on a sailboat in the Bahamas, nineteen dives, including four night dives and a chance to dive in a shark feed.
Nothing about this trip was disappointing. We had a thirteen-strong contingent of Huron Scuba divers on BlackBeard’s Sea Explorer, three additional divers, and a fantastic crew of five. That’s a lot for a 65-foot sloop, but if you weren’t looking for luxury or a ton of privacy, you had nothing to complain about. I slept well, ate well — incredibly well — and understood why warm-water diving in the ocean is so cool.
Nineteen dives in six days! The pattern was roughly this: one or two deeper dives in the morning, something shallower in the afternoon, and a shallow night dive. Sara, our funny, excellent, and thorough Spanish dive master briefed every dive with splendid visuals. A great feature of this dive boat was that they set no limits to our bottom times.
For all my dives, I buddied with Oleg. “A Russian astronomer and Finnish philosopher go diving…” sounds like the beginning of a bad joke or a minor geopolitical incident, but Oleg was a perfect buddy. We were both nerdily interested in photography and videography, and I learned a ton from Oleg. Neither of us were that into depth on this trip since going deep cuts into your dive times, especially for an air hog like me. I think I broke 90 feet once. Most of the cool stuff was between 20 and 60 feet.
Cool stuff indeed. I’d never seen corals, so that alone was awesome. Ditto for all the colorful fish. And then there were sharks. They were mainly 3-5-foot nurse and reef sharks, so nothing to worry about. And turtles, giant loggerhead turtles who swam coolly as sea cucumbers among us. And the occasional barracudas, the moray eels, the giant stingrays, the octopi. I can’t describe them; watch this video I made:
Toward the end of the trip, we were discussing people’s favorite dives. I couldn’t name one, but four stand out: the shark feeding dive (really, watch the video!), a drift dive called “The Washing Machine” (because it involved a funky crosscurrent that tumbled us all arse over teakettle), and two dives at a shallow reef called Madison Avenue, one in the light and another at night.
Even picking those four is hard, and a couple of other totally amazing dives, such as our last one at a blue hole with a giant loggerhead turtle and a friendly nurse shark, immediately come to mind. Heck, all of them rocked. And a few of them rolled.
So while I continue to love our Great Lakes, I won’t say no to the next opportunity to dive warm and clear oceans again.
Into the Not So Wild 