SCUBA

Our Scuba class started the first day we were there. Our Guide’s name was Chacón and he was the coolest. Chacon is from spain and so outside of our class we talked in Spanish. First day we watched a video and started our confined dive practice. Our confined dive consisted of learning how to set up and use the equipment as well as what to do in emergency situations. We learned all about worst case scenarios and how to stay calm to make sure you don’t get messed up.. In one exercise, chacon turned off our tanks underwater so we would know what it feels like to run out of air. It gets super hard to breathe and then the Oxygen cuts off completely. Then you signal to your partner and use their alternate.
Scuba in incredible. There is no way I can describe the feeling of breathing underwater. It’s amazing. What some people don’t know is that in scuba you make yourself neutrally buoyant, meaning you can just float 60 feet down without going up or down. To do this Neutral buoyancy comes from wearing a weight belt and inflating and deflating your vest (BCD). This feeling is kind of like being on the moon, underwater. It is SO COOL!
Utila and the keys are surrounded by coral reef. In only 2 minutes of scuba I saw more species of life that I would in a whole day on land. Coral reefs are the most beautiful things I have ever seen. I felt like I was in finding nemo a little bit. Tons of different colors and more types of fish that I can count. Our very first real dive we saw a 4 foot green moray eel, a giant ermit crab, gerden eels, trumpet fish, and so many more. On our second tank we found an upsidedown jellyfish, squirrelfish, angelfish. More fish I saw this week were parrotfish, lionfish, rockfish (huge, looks like a rock), pufferfish, barracuda, cowfish, tuna, the list goes on… The coral and sea anemonies are amazing too. All sorts of red, orange purple, blue I mean just God’s creation at it’s finest.

Lionfish are super crazy looking with all sorts of fins that stick out and are an invasive species creating huge problems in the carribbean. So, we took spearguns with us on one dive and I shot one!
One day, when we were going out to the north side we saw dolphins swimming near the boat. Our captain stopped the boat, told us all to put our mask/fins on and to go try and swim with the dolphins. It was awesome. I got probly like 5 feet away at one point as the dolphins swam al around us. We could hear the sonar under the water. Super cool.
That same day we saw some huge spotted eagle sting rays and a tuna that was just massive. O and later in the afternoon I went snorkeling and found a school of squid. I decided to scare them and they did in fact shoot out lots of black ink as they shot off.

Our last night on the Key we went on a night dive. Night dives are cool cause all sorts of animals come out at night to eat that aren’t normally out during the day like octopus, squid, lobsters, eels. Each of us had a sweet underwater flashlight, but it was still super dark and kinda creepy. Little fish swam at the light and would try and nibble on my wetsuit. It is real easy to lose each other at night so we had to stay close. We saw pretty big octopus and my favorite were to toadfish. Toadfish are these huge ugly things that kinda have the face of a frog and are very well camouflaged. They make loud croaking noises underwater so you know when you are close. They are super hard to find cause sound travels 4X faster underwater making it super difficult to identify the source of any sound underwater. We saw 2 of them that chacon found, definitely startled me when I realized it wasn’t just a rock.

Now ‘m back to school for an awful 3 weeks full of classes and close to 30 pages of papers to write. I miss waking up and walking out on our dock, sleeping with the sound ocean waves crashing outside our window, and all the tropical fish and coral surrounding our hotel.


Captain Louis. Sometimes he drives with his feet.

Us doing our buddy checks before going under

Just like the movies.



Awesome stingrays we found just gliding around



The lionfish that I killed!!