Here's the scond installment of the diving post.

I posted the first about an hour ago and you might care to read that one before this one lest some of this doesn't make sense. Of course, even after you've read the first post, it still might not make sense, but that's just how it goes...

Please enjoy...

Diving in Sint Maarten…

Part two…

When we left our intrepid dive reporter, he had just finished the Monday diving. Now… it’s

Thursday, June 28.

Today’s dive sites ended up being “The Porpoise wreck” and “Moonscape”.

I say that the sites “ended up” being this or that because that’s the way the operators dive in Sint Maarten. The sites are all so close to the shop that they tend to head out to sea and figure out where they’ll go once they get out there. Thus, don’t be alarmed when you arrive at the shop and ask “So, where will we dive this morning?” and are returned with “Who knows?!”. It’s perfectly normal.


The Porpoise Tug

Today we travelled on Paul’s boat (a nice little custom power catamaran set up exclusively for diving since the manually steered vessel was no longer in service – much to Paul’s girlfriend’s amusement) and headed out to a point about a half mile off of the point between Maho and Burgeaux Bays where we picked up a partially submerged mooring (a somewhat controversial practice especially when one of the rich people’s mega yachts gets a propeller fouled by one which causes terrible consternation since the caviar might no longer be delivered at just the right temperature or they may be forced to delay their private jet flight to St Barth’s). We actually threw Rich overboard when we all thought we saw the mooring ball underwater and then realized we hadn’t seen it so we headed off in further search. Rich swam all the way to us once we found the mooring and this didn’t seem to bother him or any of the other crew since they’re all incredibly healthy and fit!

The Porpoise was a derelict Tug that was purchased by Dive Safaris, cleaned up and towed to the site and sunk in about 85 feet of water over an open sand bottom. It makes for a very impressive dive site as you typically come up on the wreck from the stern where you are greeted by a massive rudder and propeller as your first glimpse of this large boat. The water was very clear with visibility at about 120 feet and 82 degrees on the bottom at 85 feet. Since the wreck lies on clean sand, the contrast is spectacular and you can swim all around and safely within the structure at your will. I managed to get some great shots of this wreck as well. We dove here for about 40 minutes and, towards the end of the dive, at the bottom of the mooring line at 80 feet, young instructor Rich pointed at one of the passengers named Hugo from England and casually inquired how much air he had using internationally recognized hand signals. Hugo responded. He then pointed to Hugo’s wife (or girlfriend, I wasn’t quite sure) Eleanor and asked the same question and she responded (she had a bit more air left then Hugo). He then pointed to me and gently inquired about my air and I responded. He then swam quickly to Eleanor and grabbed for her spare regulator (called an Octopus for reasons that become clear when you see one) and started breathing from it. She was pretty wide-eyed about all this since it was her sixth dive ever. Hugo figured all was well with this activity and headed off to dive some more. “Bye honey! Have fun with the nice dive instructor. I’m off to have some more fun!!” I shepherded the new couple and, once back aboard the boat we all joked that Rich might consider using a different set of international signals to let us know that his regulator had failed at 80 feet and he might be about to die. Right in front of this fair young lass who had recently been introduced to the beauty of safe recreational diving. Of course, Rich was so fit he probably could have ditched his gear and continued the dive without breathing!

The rest of the divers left the Porpoise lying quietly on the bottom and navigated the by now familiar ladder-dance back on to the boat in the four foot waves. After a short 15 minute ride towards Phillipsburg, we arrived at the next site.

Moonscape

The underwater topography around Sint Maarten is made up primarily of reefs that are known as Geologic rather than Biologic. This does not mean that there isn’t any sea-life on them. Far from it. It simply means that the reefs are not built out of coral (like the Great Barrier Reef in Australia or the Barrier Reef in Belize) but they are made of lava and basalt. Moonscape is an example of just such a reef system and we dropped into 45 feet of fairly clear water with 80 feet of visibility at 84 degrees on the bottom. Here there were lots of gorgonian fans and all variety of tube sponges and some, but not a lot, of various fishes. We again had encounters with a couple of Stingrays and a small turtle that decided it was time to flop his way to the surface for a breath of air right in front of us. He was cool indeed. Another rocking-ladder experience and then the short trip back to the dive shop on the lagoon, during which most of the males in the group pretended not to notice the young lady with us that we all wished would decide to do the return trip clothing optional. She was incredibly lovely and knew it in the nicest possible way. It’s fascinating to watch a group of guys try to make it seem as though they are looking at anything but a beautiful young woman in close proximity. It can make for some interesting conversations where the person you are talking to never quite looks at you (or hears you, for that matter!).

Back at the dock, disembarking was a sketch as everyone was pretending not to look at the bronzed young woman in the clothing optional bikini (I wonder if Luiz made it?) as they left the boat. It’s a wonder some of us weren’t killed…


Friday, June 29.

The Fingers and Fenchman’s Reef.

This group of divers consisted of three “experienced” people (myself, and a couple from New York who were well versed in Sint Maarten – she let me know this in no uncertain terms when I attempted to point something out to her early on in the trip – she’s from New York, after all), a group of kids who were just completing their dive course, and a young lady who was doing what is euphemistically known as a “resort dive”. Each group would have its own dive leader so we wouldn’t interfere with each others’ fun or learning. One of the young rookies watched me suiting up in my old t-shirt, pair of work shorts, 20 year old booties and beat-up dive fins and said “How long have you been diving?” I told him that this was my first dive and asked if this was how I was actually supposed to look and if I was supposed to do some kind of course or class work. He looked sort of concerned but I think he knew I was kidding.

We departed on Paul’s little catamaran again and passed the steering-less red dive boat tied to a pier. Maybe it will soon become the next artificial reef…


The Fingers

About half way to Philipsburg from Simpson Bay and about a half mile out to sea from the shore, we came across another fine example of the geologic reef systems at the first site of the day called “The Fingers”. These are lines of lava which run for several hundred feet along the bottom and rise up to fifteen feet off of the sand and resemble long fingers (duh!). There is a lot of growth of all kinds (corals, sponges, large fans etc.) on the lava and all kinds of interesting ledges and places where you can swim through mini caves and look for various creatures. We dropped down to around 55 feet in water that was about 70 feet visibility at around 84 degrees and there was plenty of surge down below from the wave action above. This was actually pretty common on all of the dives and it made for interesting underwater photography. By the time you were lined up on that beautiful fish to take its picture, you were suddenly either five feet further away from it or crushing it up against the reef that had so recently been your backdrop. Some of the resulting pictures are hilarious and I’ll post them if I can get over my embarrassment. I followed far behind the other experienced divers so I could try to get pictures of things without suddenly having a giant diver show up to look at what I was shooting. At one point I popped under a ledge to shoot a lobster that was hiding under there and bumped briefly up on the cave ceiling. As I continued the dive it soon became apparent that I had actually unclipped (and now freed) the tank from my vest and I had the pleasure of watching it float off in front of me and my now discombobulated vest. This was going to be interesting! I tried to keep hold of the camera while simultaneously removing the vest and grabbing the tank and gathering all the equipment together whilst still remembering that it’s a good idea to breathe while you’re 50 feet under water (unless you’re a Sint Maarten dive instructor, of course, who wouldn’t need to breathe at all). I managed to get all my gear back in place and just hoped it would basically look good when they finally found my carcass and hauled it aboard the search and rescue boat. (They’d examine the photos on the camera for any clues – I saw that in a movie once so I know it’s true – and they’d come across the final picture, a lobster giggling as he saw the tank clip come undone and me swimming out of the cave to my certain death…)

We surfaced after around 55 minutes and played ladder roulette to get back aboard, slipped the mooring and headed out for my final dive site on this trip.

Frenchman’s reef.

I’m not really sure who the “Frenchman” was but his reef is nice. We dropped into about 45 feet of water with 80 feet of visibility that was 84 degrees at the bottom and swam along another nice (although somewhat flatter) geologic reef system. Once again, there was considerable surge below which made the photography interesting for me. I’m going to have to really learn how to use my new camera system now that I finally made the switch to digital for my underwater pictures. It will take time. Lots of time, as it turns out from my results! This dive turned into a long swim across various sections of the reef and we had plenty of time to just soak it all in. We ended up being in the water for an hour and 10 minutes and every minute was a kick. Of course, just towards the end, my camera announced that the batteries were dead and it was closing up shop for the day. Just like with a film camera when you’ve clicked the last shot, this is the point where some dramatic “Kodak” moment will happen. Right on cue, a small killer attack stingray decided to lift himself up in a threatening pose (we didn’t have Paul with us so one of us was going to die and my three colleagues were all… well above me on the surface…). He looks like he’s trying to make himself very large so I press the power button on the camera and hope for just enough electrons to get a shot off… It works and my very last picture of the trip is of this little guy trying to look like a sumo wrestler. Cool…

Back to the boat, clamber aboard the rocking ladder one more time and we’re off back to the shop for my last time on this trip. We pause at the bridge for a rich person in a mega-yacht who clearly hadn’t checked his calendar and was overdue in the Mediterranean to avoid the weekly devastating hurricanes and lack of caviar and then we run to the dock and secure all lines. Finished with main engines and finished with diving for the trip.

The three days of two-tank boat diving ran me the grand sum of $230-something and the air fills for my shore diving brought that to a total of $260 for diving and another $78 to rent the tanks. Well worth it in my opinion.

Kim Frye runs the Scuba Shop dive shop and she was one of the rare people who seemed genuinely pleased to meet you on the first encounter. She’s very professional and hard working. From my experiences on this trip, I can definitely recommend both The Scuba Shop for dive gear, snorkel gear and swimming apparel and rental equipment, and their companion dive operation Dive Safaris for boat diving around the island.

At first I figured that, on the next trip, I wouldn’t rent tanks for shore diving but I probably will when it comes down to it. I’ll definitely go out on the boats again and really thought that the diving on the island easily compared with good days in the Florida Keys where I spent four years and dived many times off of our boat. I have extensively dived the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and have still never seen anything like it anywhere else in the world that I’ve yet been, but I love to dive and thoroughly enjoyed the dives on Sint Maarten.

I’ll discuss the shore diving that I did in conjunction with my post on the Villa, and I’ll do a separate post for the most spectacular diving and by far the most intriguing day of the trip, which was spent on Wednesday… on Saba…

Thanks again for your patience in reading this far if you’ve managed it.

Until next post...

James