After an exhausting and exasperating day yesterday, dashing all over Jupiter and spending most of my time reading, I finally managed two dives. Thank goodness.
Woke up early at the Super 8 and scarfed a continental breakfast. What was continental about it, i'm not sure. It might as well be called the "minimum effort breakfast". But I digress.
Drove up the highway with the stupidest name in the world; US Highway A1A Alternate (there's no US Highway A1A regular, just to clarify) and arrived at the dive centre with time to spare. Loaded my free rented gear onto the boat, calibrated my dive computer for the Nitrox mix I would be diving, and off we set!
For those that don't know, Nitrox is sort of the opposite of what it sounds like. It's not extra Nitrogen, but extra Oxygen in your air mix. Standard air is 21% Oxygen, 70% Nitrogen, and 10% miscellaneous. Nitrox can be anywhere from 24% Oxygen, up to 50% Oxygen (for the truly brave, and the tech diving crowd). The reason you would want this in your tank is because often, it's not lack of air that limits your bottom time, it's loading too much Nitrogen into your blood. After a dive, you have a surface interval before your next one, so that your body can off-gas the excess Nitrogen it's built up by breathing air at depth. Because the air is being compressed by the ocean, the deeper you are, the more air you consume in one breath, and thus, the more Nitrogen you take on in one go. Nitrox lets you stay down deep longer, and lets you have a shorter (or non-existant) surface interval. But as always...there's a catch.
You want to avoid building up Nitrogen in your blood because of a fun thing called Nitrogen Narcosis...it's basically like being a bit stoned. Like when the dentist gives you Nitrous Oxide, and you feel silly and giggly. This is a problem because people will do things like offer their regulator to a sea turtle, and then drown. With Nitrox, you avoid this risk, but you get a much scarier one...Oxygen Toxicity.
Because you're building up extra Oxygen in your body rather than extra Nitrogen, you get to fear the demon of Oxygen Toxicity. When the Oxygen Partial Pressure of your body reaches 1.6 (this is the pressure the extra oxygen in your blood exerts on the rest of the gasses in you) you'll tense up. Your limbs seize, you have convulsions, sometimes blackouts, and of course then there goes your regulator and you drown. So - you can stay down longer, but you have a very, very serious maximum depth to worry about.
Fortunately, you can just punch the mix into your computer, and it'll tell you your Oxygen Partial Pressure at any given time, and warn you if you get too close to your maximum depth. It's a little nerve wracking though when you're skirting the edges of it. Picture this:
You'll be at the side of a sunken ship, and you see something cool on the sand below it. Maybe a goliath grouper or something else amazing. You want to go check it out. You look down and your computer says you're about 5 metres above your maximum depth. The oxygen sat numbers patiently flash 1.21...(1.4 is danger, 1.6 is extreme danger, over 1.6 is convulsions, and likely death). You're well within your limits...and it doesn't look that far. How tall is this ship anyway? So you descend. Slowly.
The number rise and sink accordingly...4 metres, 3 metres, 1.24, 1.28...and you're torn between looking where you're going, and looking at your wrist. You pop your ears to relieve the pressure. Another diver swims by below you, and you feel better. Then you think wait...is he diving with the same Nitrox mix as me? Your eyes snap back to your computer, 2 metres, 1.5, this is getting a bit too close for comfort. How far is the bottom? Your oxygen numbers rise. Out of the corner of your eye, the other diver below you leisurely swims along the bottom, poking his head under the ship to see what secrets he can ferret out. Your computer starts beeping, startling you. You stop your descent, a little shaky, fearful of what's next.
Why did I even come down here again?
It's very easy to be swept away but all the amazing things the ocean has to tease you with. Everything is foreign down here, even man made objects are transformed into fish villages, new reef, and predator stomping grounds. But you have to remember that you do not belong here. We're so luck to even see this much. We have to know our limits. Especially the ones we impose on ourselves.
It's not all so scary as that though. If there's something interesting, and it looks too deep to go...you just leave it :P
Anyway... I got WAY off course there. I was talking about these dives. The first one was awesome - they called it the Wreck Trek. Three shipwrecks, all within a couple hundred metres of each other. The weird thing is, due to some odd Atlantic undercurrents, some days the water's beautiful, other days it's quite cool, and today in particular it was 25 degrees....right up until about 80 feet. Then you pass through a thermocline, and it abruptly drops to 19 degrees C. Glad I took a full-body wetsuit.
It was a pretty cool dive (no pun intended) and in spite of the current up top, the bottom current was pretty easy to deal with. We drifted over each of the three wrecks in turn, doing a couple neat swim-throughs and seeing a couple of massive Goliath Grouper. They were each about the size of a person. I didn't get a good photo of one, but I did roll a bit of footage on one that came right up close to me. That'll be still to come.
The first ship was called the Zion, but I can't remember the names of the others. Fairly small, except for the last, but with a lot of wildlife hanging out. We dove with a spearfisherman who spotted and killed 6 lion fish (they're an invasive species here, and you'll see wanted posters for them). He was an interesting character...first one down and last one up on each dive, and going deeper than most of us. Must've been part fish. All in all, a pretty excellent dive.
After surfacing, we found most of the Americans so shaken by the cold, that no less than six people opted out of the second dive. I couldn't believe it! 19 is a little chilly, but hardly freezing, and these people were all in wetsuits! I felt as the only Canadian, I had to make it known that 19 degrees does not constitute cold water. I was met with mixed reactions. Anyway, more reef for the rest of us.
The second dive we did was on a reef nearby. It was pretty good, but not stunning. Though we did have a few very spicy moments. The first came almost right away.
He was a little camera-shy, but this big 3 foot loggerhead turtle hung out with us for a little bit, before clumsily lumbering off to...whatever it is turtles have going on at 11 in the morning. That was a cool encounter.
We also saw a couple of massive goliath grouper, and again, I wasn't able to get great shots of them, but we did get to see them hustle at top speed under the reef, and they are fast for a fish that size! Must've been like 400 pounds. Although I kept hearing afterwards that for Goliath Grouper, those were quite small, and that there are ones seen often the size of a Volkswagen Microbus. That's crazy to imagine. These ones were big enough, thank you. I'd love to see one though. Maybe tomorrow...
I was relieved to finally be in the water, and diving all morning made me feel a lot better. I looked at my options for the afternoon...I needed to make up yesterday's dives, but I wasn't sure I wanted to do more diving in Jupiter. It was neat, but not amazing. I felt like the keys would have more to offer, so I figured I'd do a morning and an afternoon dive in Key West tomorrow.
In the meantime, I had a whole afternoon and evening to kill, and so when I realized I was 3.5 hours from my hotel, but only 3 hours from where my whole family had just arrived today, I decided to go surprise them for dinnertime.
I drove across the state of Florida, from the Atlantic side to the Gulf side, in just under 3 hours, and arrived just in time to catch my family sitting down for a beer before dinnertime! They were sufficiently surprised, and it was nice! We all went to the Outback, and had a great dinner together.
After coming back, I showed my Uncle my underwater shooting rig (he's a big cameraphile as well), gave my Dad the details on my arrival Tuesday, and took off back to the keys. It was a long, long night of driving, and I was really, really tired. I stopped a few times for naps.
Upon finally arriving (LATE) back to my hotel, I dumped my camera's cards, charged my batteries, assembled my housing and threw myself in bed as soon as was humanly possible. I had to wake up early to drive two hours to Key West in the morning, and it was looking like I was doing it on very little sleep. Oh well...warm water and big shipwrecks awaited me in the morning, and I couldn't wait! Another great day under the sea.
'till then!
-Jeff
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