Saturday, March 5, 2011

Reef Diving in Cozumel Mexico

To follow up with my last post, we had a second dive on the outing while we were in Cozumel.  It's the little island in the map below, and if you use the little plus sign on the embedded image, you can even zoom in to see a few cruise ships.  Kind of a cool technology...I wonder if the satellites know where I put the TV remote?


View Larger Map

For those of you that are non-divers, you will generally do a 2 tank dive during the course of an outing.  I'm sure that you can do more, and the guides we were using there stated that they usually did 4-5 dives in a day.

Part of the process is you will do the deeper dive first and then follow up with a more shallow dive after a period of rest on the surface.  I won't go into the details of why this is the sequence, but it has to do with the body absorbing Nitrogen gas in the blood at depth and expelling it through spending time on the surface.  If you get too much Nitrogen gas in your blood and surface, you can certainly hurt yourself since it will form air bubbles in your blood and joints called decompression sickness or "The Bends".  At best, this condition really hurts, and at worst, can kill you.  Hence the very conservative rest period and a shallow dive following a deep one. On a side note, my ever so perfect wife is sure that she can actually get the bends by getting up out of bed too early.  I don't think I have seen good scientific evidence of this being actually dangerous, but what do I know, though?

The video attached is the shallow dive of our two dives of the day.  The water was in the upper 70's and very clear, but after a bit of soaking in that temperature, it definitely produced some pretty good chatters.  It's absolutely worth it to see the marine life though.  On this trip, we encountered large coral heads, but not quite as massive as further down the wall in the earlier in the day.  If you missed the last post, it's here.

I should know what the reef name is, but due to some really strange and unusual factors...like me not paying attention, I can only recall something like.  "And for the second dive we will be diving on the mumble mumble blah blah mumble Reef.", and thusly, I have taken my amazing ability of creativity and  named it "The Reef Dive".  Yep.  REALLY descriptive there, but it has a good ring to it, so I think it will stick...

Seriously people, cut me some slack, and if you know what the reef name was through some random tidbit of knowledge, send me a note in the comments section and tell me.  Yeah, I know I'm typing to myself again, and since I'm probably the only person reading this blog, I will guess the odds of me sending myself the correct information in the comments section are slim to nil.  Whatever...


On with the video, and as always, have a wonderful and safe week.  Get outside and enjoy, you can find the TV remote later!



And, the HD version is linked here, but you will have to go to the YouTube site to see it.  Just click below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cdlcpqfq70U&hd=1






1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I really liked it. Brad, you conveyed the beauty and the serenity--and in HD. I loved it.

Papa