Day 3 in St. Croix: 2 dives and lessons learned: ALWAYS check & triple-check your gear

Date: 10.03.2014

For the afternoon I booked us one dive at Cane Bay, before the night dive which was scheduled at 18:30. The prices between the diving companies varied a lot in St. Croix - from the same kind of dives there could be 20-30USD difference. Because I sent the inquiries yesterday, several places declined to do the dives with us because it was "too late" to organize anything for the next day.

Ocean Surgeonfish

French grunt,  maybe White Grunt and a Ocean Surgeonfish

One in the list was a company which had several shops around the island and they pride themselves for having small groups instead of the herds of diving tourists, which is a frightening even as a thought for me.

After picking our stuff from the laundry and eating something quick in the car while driving to the bay (boys had burgers for breakfast from McDonald's, I got a McFlurry), we arrived to the dive shop. It seemed to be a busy moment for them, one group just getting back and lots of people floating around. There also seemed to be some kind of lottery going on which one of them would be heading in the water with us.

Black Durgon, French grunt and a Blue Chromis

Banded Butterflyfish

Two Caribbean sea walruses - this far apart of each other, A RARE SIGHT :D

The first BCD Timo got had a broken release buckle and he changed the BCD vest, got a feeling that the guy behind the desk saw this as nuisance more than "Oh look at that, sorry, we'll put this away so it will be fixed" -moment. I got my gear too and started to put them together. I checked my gauges  - OK, my BCD - OK,  backup regulator - OK, main regulator - OK, second (or third) long press with the main regulator - a leakage. It just continued to give some air out and it took a moment for me to get anybody's attention that this should be changed.

I laughed about this to the woman who was supposed to be our divemaster, that "This start's strong, first broken buckle and now broken regulator" and she just snapped "Maybe you should bring your own gear next time". Oh. Well. OK. Maybe Finnish sarcastic humor isn't your cup of tea.. And I continued to check my new regulator and putting my stuff together.

Coral nursery

Just before heading out the woman told us that she's sorry because she has to go for a boat dive but she'll come with us for the night dive later on. We got a 20 something year old guy who didn't speak much and we headed to the water.

Pretty soon we were under water and started to dive along the coast. There were a lot of fishes and some waves. We headed to a  coral nursery and then to some place where there was a sea horse. Not the real kind, just a carousel horse, under water. Cute for tourists, but I wasn't so interested of it because there were fishes, corals, snails and such present :). My regulator's mouth piece felt a little moist during the dive, it was annoying but nothing too annoying (and it didn't leak air, so I got that going for me :D).

Yay a Sea Horse with Halen, and our very interested dive master :)

There was quite a lot of spots where there wasn't really reefs, just sand, before we got near The Wall. Just before we were reaching it, we turned around. Odd. Or maybe I just lost my sense of direction and I was imagining we were heading back. But no, we were heading back.

We got back up from the dive after 49 minutes of diving, average depth 7,6m and just 5 minutes before this stnz had half a tank left and I had 1600psi left when we got up. Timo also had  ~half a tank left when we got up. I can truly say that I wasn't pleased in any way, more of that later on.

Halen, again :)

Small scale life

After the dive there was a certain silence while we were cleaning the gear and packing our stuff up, seemed to be that the silence spoke a lot of how we all experienced the dive. I re-checked the times we should meet up by the pier at the evening, and we left to Christiansted to get our hotel room.

We got to the hotel where I asked the guys yesterday to visit and book us a room, which they had said that "no need to book a room, we have plenty free, just walk inside and you'll have your room". Well... we walked in and there was no room :D. After a long discussion when the receptionist remembered stnz, they managed to book us a room from the hotel next door - of course it was more expensive but fortunately not too much.

Black Durgon and a Redband Parrotfish

Two Black Durgons

Christmas tree worms, you need to be sneaky to get a picture of them before they go hiding :)

Stack of corals and stuff, a new home for little fishes

A Smooth Trunkfish, one of my favorites :)

We got there, and spent 15 minutes with the reception trying to figure out why our keys weren't working for the room before we got inside. The room was good in size, but smelled bad, and the carpet felt really sticky under your feet so you needed to use flip-flops inside.. Well this will do for one night. Only 2 queen beds so it was interesting to see if the guys could cuddle up in one bed or not >:)

After a short break we headed to Frederiksted to eat and then for the dive. This day was really "eat as unhealthy as possible" -day, because we ate something from KFC this time :D.

Yay the rain stopped in Frederiksted

We waited for the guys from the dive shop to arrive and admired the beautiful sunset and the little park on the pier. It was a gorgeous place. They came and we got our gear together. There was a NOAA ship at the pier which meant that we could not go to the end of the pier and had to cut the dive a little short.. Just suitable continuity for our good luck of the day... But hey, there was a rainbow and the rain was gone :)

Fountain at the park

Sun setting (and the place where we were going to jump in the water from) and the NOAA boat

Rainbow :)

While we were gearing up I told about our earlier dive to the guy and the woman and what we experienced. There were some things I just couldn't hold my mouth shut, including the fact that Timo didn't really got to see The Wall because we turned back just before it.

• First thing was that the guy didn't ask even once under water if we were OK. It's pretty much a standard thing to do and check even couple of times, first and foremost in the beginning so you can see that all had their pressures stabilized and the gears were working. 
• Second thing was the air. The guy didn't ask how much air we had in our tanks, and none of us got the chance to even show him, so he had no knowledge of our air consumption. 
• Third was the diving time because of the amount of air we had in our tanks when we got up - it could've been easily 10-20mins longer. 
• Fourth was his general attitude, he had a hurry to move to the next place underwater and didn't really make any contact with us or the surrounding nature. He just floated around and seemed really bored. Usually DMs do know the places and try to find you something interesting to look at, different kind of species and such. He was just there as a breathing buoy to guide us where to go and how to get back..
  
  Because the constant feel of hurry, my images from this dive suck even more because I didn't really have the time to STOP and think and then shoot.. I was constantly looking over my shoulder when they were going somewhere because I always had to go a little further from everybody to see something I wanted..

I could see that the guy we were with (I'm pretty sure he was the company owner or manager) and the woman were both surprised and very disappointed of the guy's behavior. Later on after the dives the woman assured me that it's pretty certain that the guy would get his ass kicked because of this, and I'd say he needed it.

And now. Time to go down. Down down down.

Well - let's go back to the fun part. Diving in the dark again, yay! This time we didn't go really deep because the pier was in surprisingly shallow water compared to the pier in Vieques. There were lots of interesting animals and I got to see my first real sea horse in the sea :). There were couple of species of scorpion fishes, some of them were surprisingly huge. And I'm pretty sure we spotted a red frogfish. Funniest encounter was a huge turtle sleeping on the top of a big sea sponge. We also saw couple of different species of octopi, brittle stars and crabs. I also saw a big stingray while we were on the surface, but I'm sure our jumping into the water scared him off.

Because of the NOAA ship and the fact that the guards didn't like divers underneath any ships, we had to turn around early. When we got to the surface the guy gave us lots of praises of our behavior under water - he really loved that we didn't touch the animals, left the seahorse to do it's business and didn't go too near and wake up the turtle. Things that are no-brainers for us, but evidently some divers think that they can and should disturb the animals instead of just observing them.

Getting up from the pier was tricky business because there was only some rocks we used to get up - the guy helped us step by step where to put our feet when getting up. For me it was easiest because I had my open heel fins and because of it - my booties. They came in handy once again ;).

After the dive we went inside their dive shop to dry ourselves, and talked a little more. The woman was sincerely sorry of our experiment and wanted to take us for a dive next morning, but unfortunately we needed to leave back to San Juan on the same day so it was a little too risky.

Only almost OK picture - Note to self: use manual mode if photographing with a flashlight next time :)

Even though this dive was cut short because of the NOAA ship, I got a much positive feeling about the dive shop during this night dive than I had earlier. There were more interesting species of animals to see, but comparing the two night dives, I liked Vieques pier a lot more :).