Finally some real diving

When planning this adventure, we imagined that we would be snorkeling or using the hookah dive system every day. I thought I would wake up in the morning, jump into the water and splash around for a while before getting back on-board to make breakfast. That was a silly dream, and definitely not reality. For a few reasons, like how I get cold easily and jumping into cold water first thing after waking up isn’t appealing, but mostly because we just haven’t been able to find reefs nearby.

Diving with our Brownie

As detailed in our prior post. we wait out some storms while tied up to what we believe is a dive site mooring ball. The rain clouds finally part ways and we gear up to get in the water. Matt checks things out first with just his mask and fins, confirming that there is some gorgeous reef below us. This is the perfect time to finally enjoy our Brownie hookah dive system! We’re pretty excited to finally be able to use it. I thought I’d be using it every day and instead we never use it at all. I will admit, it’s a bit of work to get it all set up though. Snorkeling is great because you can be geared up and in the water in a matter of seconds.

Getting the Brownie set up is worth it though. This dive site is between 15-30 feet which is a really nice, safe depth to use a hookah dive system. It takes us a bit of time (mostly me) to figure out how much weight we need and to get comfortable with the set up. We spend about 45 minutes actually underwater diving at this site, enjoying a gigantic coral head filled with tons of aquarium fish. Although we didn’t spot anything big (no sharks this time), the dive was quite beautiful.

To see even more of our dive, check out this 45 second video!

On to the next dive site

After loading everything back into the boat, we decide to head over to that other mooring ball we spotted earlier. We struggle a bit more to tie up this time. I am able to get the boat hook onto the mooring but I miss the connected rope. This essentially causes me to not have the strength to lift the mooring high enough out of the water (quick enough) to be able to get my own rope hooked on. Instead, our boat is still slowly moving over the mooring which is then pulling the boat hook and my arm back under the bow. I drop the boat hook, but we are able to quickly recover it with another boat hook. No harm, no foul. We try again. The boat hook gets ripped out of my hands again. This time it sinks.

We switch places for the third try and are successful. Thank goodness we have a second boat hook on board. Matt sticks his face in the water again and announces that this site is a wreck. I’m a bit disappointed as I’m not a big fan of wreck diving. We went through all the work to get here and get the Brownie set up though, so we hop in the water. Our sunken boat hook is conveniently laying right next to the sunken barge; we pick that back up. Matt has some fun playing around while I snap a few photos.

The barge is quite small and not really accessible to swim through, so it’s a pretty quick circle around the wreck. We begin to check out a few coral heads nearby to see what else we can find.

Learning valuable lessons

We’re about 15 minutes into the dive at this point, and we begin to hear the motor sound like it’s sputtering a bit – at the least, it sounds different. We give each other an inquisitive look, listen harder, and then decide we better get back to the surface. As soon as we do, the motor dies – yikes that means our air supply dies too. Now I know both of our moms are reading this and secretly swearing to not try hookah diving after all, or possibly plotting ways to get it off our boat since it sounds dangerous. This was completely user error (my error), though.

The Brownie is supposed to be able to run for about 3-4 hours on a tank of gas. We definitely hadn’t been diving that many hours, so I didn’t think we needed to refill it. We later realize though that what we thought was “full” was actually only about half full. Regardless, we will always top off the tank before each time getting in the water to make sure that doesn’t happen again. This is another great reason why we don’t plan to use the system at more than 50-60 feet (for short periods only) and ideally around 20-30 feet most of the time. If something were to happen and our air supply is cut off at say 30 feet, we can easily shoot straight to the surface with little to no risk of injury. Lesson learned today. 

We slowly swim our way back to the boat – which isn’t too far, but one of us (me) thought that she didn’t need a snorkel. Another lesson learned. As we are swimming, we see something large and brown at the surface. To me, it honestly looks like a piece of carboard or metal, but then Matt proclaims that it’s a giant turtle. It is really giant! This would have been an amazing spot, and I definitely would have chased it with the GoPro under normal circumstances, but we’re both pretty tired and after the little incident, just want to be back on-board Sea Monster.

We get all our gear rinsed with some fresh rain water we caught earlier and warm up with some dry clothes. The diving was actually pretty great. It feels amazing to sit back and realize that we are doing this on our own. We drove our own boat up to a dive site, used our own gear, and dived on our own schedule. It’s very liberating, but also a bit humbling as we have to be extra cautious and smart about what we’re doing since there isn’t a dive master there to baby sit us.

With more storms in the forecast, we call over to the nearby marina to spend the night. We have every intention of finding some more dive or snorkel sites tomorrow.