Diving - Fantasea. Slow boats but they took pretty good care of us. There were occasional shortages of filled tanks for shore dives.
Dive Sites:
La Ceiba - Shore dive
Max Depth - 32 FSW Water temp - 80 F Viz - Unlimited Time - 32
Hurricane did some serious damage on the shallows. What is left of the airplane is pretty well scattered around the lagoon. Still a nice easy shore dive. Spent a lot of time on the surface waiting on students. Saw a peacock flounder, sea cucumber, sand diver and all the typical shallow water fish.
La Ceiba - Shore dive - night
Max Depth - 32 FSW Water temp - 80 F Viz - Night Time - 66
Great night dive. Lots of macro to shoot. Spotted moray out on the reef. Sleeping parrots. Squid. For a shore dive, this is a good one.
Santa Rosa Wall
Max Depth - 87 FSW Water temp - 80 F Viz - Unlimited Time - 33
Diving with students doing a Deep Speciality. One had problems and I took her back up to 60 feet with the rest of the group so didn't get to see the better parts of the wall. Ah well, the hazards of being the only DM on the trip with an Instructor with students. Still a nice dive but Santa Rosa is really getting beat up. They need to close it down to divers for a while. There is broken coral everywhere. Some big grouers hanging around and I did get a picture that looks like my wife is taking her pet grouper for a walk. Our dog could never heel that well.
San Francisco
Max Depth - 116 FSW Water temp - 80 F Viz - Unlimited Time - 36
This time all the students were fine. Pretty reef but I was too busy to take many notes..
Punta Tunica - twilite
Max Depth - 65 FSW Water temp - 80 F Viz - twilite Time - 32
Not much to see. The reef seemed to be in transition. Very little life around but a pretty reef
Tormentos - Night
Max Depth - 55 FSW Water temp - 80 F Viz - night Time - 39
Great night dive til the current switched and the DM insisted on swimming into the current. Those of us with cameras weren't especially affected since we were crawling along the bottom but everyone else was really PO'd. Saw an octopus, several lobster (including the one on the top of this page and a slipper lobster in the photo gallery.) Some saw squid but I did not. Some big fish moving in over the reef late in the dive
Columbia Deep
Max Depth - 125 FSW Water Temp - 80 F Viz - unlimited Time - 18
Something let loose in my Nemesis. 12 minutes in, I went from 2200 PSI to 3500 PSI. I knew I was a blowhard but that was ridiculous. I didn't get to enjoy much of this dive but I definitely want to go back cause it was a really pretty reef. Did see a turtle on the surface while I was cussing at the computer.
Punta Dahlila
Max Depth - 62 FSW Water Temp - 80 F Viz - unlimited Time - 40
A pretty reef with lots of fish including some big barracuda and a ray as well as the ubiquitous groupers. Unfortunately, I was so PO'd at the computer failure that I didn't enjoy it as much as I might.
Food:
Food is cheap. We had breakfast each day at the fajita factory across the street from La Ceiba for about $3 per person. The grill at the hotel is OK for lunch but wander around the town and you will be accosted by people wanting to feed you good meals at ridiculously low prices.
chuck@chopf.com send some E-mail to Chuck
©1995 Construction started on Sep. 20, 1996 by the MadMonk