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One of the great things about the Cancun area is the wide diversity of high quality dives within easy reach; any one of the areas: Cancun, Cozumel & Cenotes
stands alone as a great dive destination. Combined, they make for a great, diverse diving adventure. After some internet research, we used a smaller American-owned company
in Cancun for all our dives in the Cancun/
Cozumel area - we'd been warned about the large, batch dive operations that dump 20+ divers in the water at the same time & place.
The divemasters were knowledgeable & friendly. My underwater camera flooded during our first dive (Cozumel), so no videos from there so far. In the mark of a great operation,
Oure dive operator secured a professional videographer to accompany us on the remaining dives or provided the reef footage. The videos of the Cancun area are shown courtesy of the company & the videographer: Edgar Gonzales.
Cozumel is known for great visibility (often better than 100 ft), drift dives, walls
& large fish: on our dive we saw some large bass, potato cod & the biggest lobster I've ever seen: its tail must have been 1 ft wide! We went out with one of the smaller dive outfits.
We had a nice small group (we'd been ): 5 of us plus the dive master.
When my underwater camera flooded they accomodated me returning it to the boat (in the vain hope that the water hadn't destroyed it; I had no spare camera) & got me back into the water efficiently.
The Wall dive was a strong current drift dive between 80 - 110 ft. After returning my camera, I was towed by boat to the
divers' location & I rejoined them. The divemaster was watching me on the way down (I'd never have done that if the visibility hadn't been as good) & I enjoyed the rest of the dive;
our divemaster pointed out where lots of good stuff was hidden, including a rare Splendid Toad Fish, which he teased out of a rock for us to check out.
The second dive was at a coral garden. Not many shoals of fish: due to overfishing most likely, though it was good to see some big guys out there: rays, cod & giant bass & the reef was in good shape.
I learned a couple of costly, but valuable, lessons from this:
1. Thoroughly check & test the assembled camera gear in fresh water before heading out!
2. Consider getting a spare set up as replacement gear is hard / impossible to find in Mexico (& if you do, it'll take time from your vacation & the price will be twice what it'd be in the US!). I have 2 replacements on order as
I write this.
3. Sometimes it's nice just to enjoy the dive without fussing around with equipment. It certainly made for lower air consumption! |
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