Scuba Diving is a sport we
just picked up when we decided to travel to
Cancun and
Cozumel for the
millennium. It would seem like blasphemy to travel to
Cozumel, home of
the world's greatest drift diving and, at times, 200+ feet of
visibility, without trying diving. So, we attended our
open-water training course through
Thunder
Reef Divers in Vancouver,
Washington (A
PADI 5-star
facility) in September, 1999. The bookwork breezed with
PADI's CD-ROM tutorial, though there was sure a lot more to
know than we had expected! The confined water training
took place in Thunder Reef's own swimming pool, which was no
big deal, except that I couldn't clear my ears! I have
allergies, a divers nemesis, and at this point I had not yet
discovered Afrin! We passed, though, and headed up to
Les Davis Marine Park in Tacoma, Washington for our open-water
training in Puget Sound.
The water was unbelievably cold, with temperatures in the 40s
underwater, but we were adequately protected by 11mm 2-piece
wetsuits, hoods, gloves and boots (We've gotta get dry suits,
though!). The visibility was poor, since we were milling
around on the silty bottom, sometimes nonexistent. When
we got moving, I had trouble again clearing my ears and found
myself drifting away from everyone else! When we found
them, we swam around for a little while, adjusting to our first
underwater experience. We saw crabs, huge anemones, and
a few fish. Kind of cool, but nothing to get too excited
about. While swimming, visibility was never more than
40 feet or so, usually quite a bit less. But, we passed
and were psyched up to visit
Cancun and
Cozumel in December!
Check out the links at left for reviews of the reefs and reports
of our trip!
We just returned from diving in
Hawaii, off the islands
of Lana'i,
Maui,
Kaua'i, and the Big Island. We dove with manta rays, sharks,
turtles, and dolphins, along with hundreds of other sea creatures
in the beautiful waters of Hawaii. We're working on web
pages for those trips as we speak. Following that will
be our latest trip: the Florida Keys! Don't forget
to check back!
Aside from photographs of our trips, we have included links
to diving-related sites of the Northwest and others that have
proven to be valuable to us in our research of what equipment
to buy and where to go. You can visit these in the
Northwest Scuba Directory.
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just picked up when we decided to travel to