Diving

One reason I like to dive...you always get to see cool stuff.  Sometimes you get to interact with animals most people have only seen in aquariums.  Sometimes that's unfavorably...like when I got "attacked" by a reef squid on a night dive in Bonaire.  But usually, if the wildlife decide to check you out rather than swim away, it creates amazing memories.  Don't worry, we're always safe and on the look out if, say, the "wildlife" in question is actually a hungry shark or barracuda.  Normally they look a tasty morsel....which is not human.

O Hai!

Stingray, trying to escape detection.  He had buried himself in sand at one point, with just his eyes showing, until he realized we knew he was there.  Hence all the sand flying off of him in this pic.

Turtle!

But in Aruba, they are known for their wrecks.  (Bonaire is known for shore diving.)  Wreck diving is actually a speciality in diving, and some wrecks are very technical and require advanced training.  Technically, I don't have that training.  But when I penetrate a wreck, it's an easy wreck.  Easy to get in and out of, and always able to see the surface (sometimes complicated wrecks can get divers turned around where they don't know where the surface is or they get lost or stuck.  That would freak me out).

At first, we saw no wrecks.  We saw coral, fish and eels.  And our divemaster posing as a shark.  He tried to convince us he was a shark, anyway.  I didn't believe him.

Spotted Moray Eel

French Angel Fish

Cool looking coral formation 

Fritz...our sharky divemaster.  He offered to take a picture of us...but first snapped a few of him...

He eventually got around to it.  I was even super cool and took out my reg so I could smile.

But we ended up doing some cool wrecks.  First, the Antilla.  Which, if you are a diver in Aruba, you just gotta do the Antilla.  It is a German WWII U-boat supply ship that was scuttled.  The Captain decided he'd rather see his fairly new ship sink rather than surrender it to the Dutch.  The Antilla lies on her left side, so everything is kind of of sideways.  It's a big ship.  More info can be found here.  It was hard to get a good perspective shot, as visibility was kind of down that day.  EDIT:  SE Aruba Fly and Dive (our dive operator) had this article on their website about the "true" story of the Antilla.  Much less dramatic, but she was scuttled, none the less.)

Top of one of the masts.

Cool shot that John took

me swimming through

another cool ghostly shot

The next dive(s) we did were the airplanes.  One is of an old Air Aruba plane that was donated and sunk in 2004 to be an artificial reef, and the other one was also sunk earlier, but was in pieces due to a hurricane that swept through in 1999.  Airplanes underwater definitely feel out of place when you swim up on one.

boo

boarding Air Aruba....

swimming down the fuselage.  thank god they took the seats out.

coming out from under the wing

Second air plane...a little more worse for wear.

huge propellers

The last wreck we dove was the Jane C.  (or Jane Sea, depending you ask.)  Apparently it was a cargo ship that was confiscated for smuggling drugs.  This was our last day of diving, and John and I had demonstrated ourselves to be pretty low maintenance divers at this point, so our team of divemasters essentially grouped us with the volunteer 19 year old dive instructor.  It was a compliment.  We were the first ones in and the last ones out of the water.

Me watching Gino 

Swimming through the cargo area.

John, doing his best impersonation of Captain Morgan on the deck

Gino, photographing at the bow of the ship

And lastly.  Here I am diving the last dive of the day at Barcadera.  It was super shallow, so we were down for 71 minutes!  (Dives usually last 35-50 minutes)  This was just a cool shot of elk horn coral, which I haven't seen in a while, and me.  Swimming right along.  :)