A giant ray

So now that I have finished my move to the Bahamas it is time to get onto the important things in life: DIVING!!!!

So I organised myself and headed off to the closest dive shop. This happened to be Bahama Divers. In fact there are only two dive shops that I could find on New Providence Island: Bahama Divers and Stuart Cove. As I am planning on being here for quite awhile I am definitely going to end up diving with them.

Booking with them was easy. I just spoke to one of the guys in the shop and he set me up with a dive on the Sunday. It was a 2-tank dive for a very reasonable price.

As I have all my own kit all I needed was a wetsuit, they gave me a medium but it was too small – I really need to lay off the beers – so I upgraded to a large.

There were 6 of us on the dive. A young couple, who dance for Cirque di Soleil, and their father, and an older couple from New Mexico. They were all on cruises and only had a short time to go diving.

We left on the boat and went around Paradise Island to the North Side. The plan was to do the Miranda Wreck.

In 55ft. of water this 90ft. wreck lies on her side in two sections.  A good medium depth wreck to give the diver ample time to explore and observe the rays and many tropical fish that makes their home on and around the Miranda.

The dive briefing was brief and wasn’t that detailed. We were haphazardly put into buddies and there was no reminder about buddy checks. The dive leader dropped his kit over the side and free dived to the bottom and put his kit on – pretty cool but not good if any of the divers had had a problem on the way down. There wasn’t that much left of the wreck. It has been destroyed in the storms that had battered the island. Though there were lots of wildlife to see.

After the dive we had a short surface interval. Normally I am used to at least 45 minutes between dives and it does seem a little fast to get back into the water.

The next dive site wasn’t that far away. It was called Trinity Caves

This site is a collection of shallow caves, actually deeply recessed ledges, with three major openings. In 45ft. of water, the caves go in about 30ft. with the largest opening eight feet across and five feet high.  Look for large lobster and reclusive grouper.

By the time we got to the dive site the weather was starting to turn. It had become overcast and it looked like it was going to thunder. There are a lot of parrot fish at the Trinity Caves and the dive boat offers $1 bags of food that you can feed them with. I didn’t buy a bag but some of the other divers did. I don’t know how I feel about feeding the fish, honestly I think that it can have good and bad benefits – but that discussion is for another post.

I really enjoyed this dive. It was better than the previous one in my opinion. I enjoyed exploring the “caves” which were more like small caverns. There was so much life. I spotted rays, eels, stonefish, arrowcrabs, and many more things. It was definitely my favourite out of the two. It was soon time to turn around and head back to the boat. As we arrived at the boat, it was time to do a safety stop, below us about 10-15m away was a reef shark. It was fun to watch it while I waited for the 3 minutes to tick by.

Overall I enjoyed the dives, and I think that diving out here is much more “relaxed” than it is in the Mediterranean. Rules are followed as closely and you are more responsible for your own well being.

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