Cozumel Diving 2011 - Day 2 Night Dive

This is the sunset as we headed out for our Day 2 Night Dive. Hey, we know it's beautiful and you'd like to be here, but we hope these few photos will help you live the moments with us. Enjoy and feel free to leave comments. A beautiful Peacock Flolunder nestled on the Carribean floor.
This is not Trigger, but it is a horse of sorts. We found four or five on this dive.

Female Parrot Fish
Straight off the Northwestener! Capt. Sig would be proud.

Video of Octopus

Cozumel Diving 2011 - Day 3

Well, here we are on Friday and we had two more fantastic dives this morning. Dive one was to the famous "Devil's Throat" reef which is basically a long cave like dive inside a coral reef. The cavern is entered at about 80 ft. depth and then goes straight down to about 130 ft. There's not much sea life inside, but the penetrating sunligt is beautiful on the coral. Photos taken there didn't turn out because of the lack of light Sorry.
Photos are from the second dive of the day, on Columbia Shallows. This is a great dive with many fish and other sea life. It is one of our favorite, and shallowest, dive locations. All of the photos are from Columbia Shallows. Oh yes, we did have a mishap Yesterday on our night dive. My camera case, for unknown reasons, flooded immediately on entering the water. I checked it and it was locked down. Apparently a piece of sand had gotten on the O-ring, but we're not sure. Anyway, the camera is now history so I'll be on line when we return home looking for another one just like it. The case cost as much, or more, as the camera and will only accept that model of Canon camera. So, the rest of the trip we'll be using only Reva's camera. Hopefully, she'll let me take a couple of pics each dive. She let me take about five today and the green Moray eel is my only photo shown here. The rest are hers! Thanks for checking out the blog and we hope you enjoy the pics.

Cozumel Diving 2011 - Day 2

Day 2 -- Thursday 7-14-2011 This was a great day of diving. The weather and water were perfect and we saw so much of God's creation/creatures, from some of the smallest to some of the largest. We saw tiny nudi-branch, sea worm, crab, lobster, reef fish, shark, two HUGE grouper and then as the grand fanalie...........a pod of pilot whales! These are very rare around Cozumel. One lady we were diving with has been diving here for over twenty years and never seen one. Today, as we came up from our second dive the boat captain was very excited because he had spotted the pod off in the distance. As he approached the pod, what he thought was three or four was actually several dozen. Pilot whales are similar in appearance to dolphin but their nose and dorsal fin are different. They are much darker in color than dolphin and much larger. These ranged from around eight feet up to about twelve feet in length as best we could tell. While we were't allowed to actually swim with them, it was a sight to see. The last photo in this group is of a couple of these whales just as they breeched. Reva did a great job catching the action. We'll be headed out for a night dive shortly, so what for more tomorrow.

Reva says, "Hello" to everyone.

Pilot Whale Video (19 seconds)

Cozumel Diving 2011

Day 1, Thursday 11-13 Well, we arrived safely and right on time. After picking up the rental car and dropping off luggage it was straight to El Chalango's for an authentic Cozumelen "lunpper" (combo of lunch and supper). Homemade soup and two excellent chicken dishes (mine was Pollo Poblano) reallly hit the spot. A quick trip to the grocery store to stock up on essentials like fresh shrimp, avocados, fruit, veggies and Coke Zero assurred that we would not be going hungry. Checked in with our dive shop (Dive Paradise), rented a locker and hit the water for our check-out dive. This was a dusk shore dive just behind Hotel Barracuda and was one of the best dives we've ever had at this location. If it was an indication of what we will see this week, it will be fantastic diving. Below are a few photos of the dive. The first one is of my Do-Rag Babe and I think you can figure the rest out. Hope you enjoy them.

Hope you enjoy these short videos shot on our recent trip to Cozumel, Mexico.
All footage was shot by Reva and me using a Canon 1200 SD camera.

"School Is In Session"

"Grace Under the Sea"


Master of Disguise (Peacock Flounder)


Porcupine Puffer Fish

Toad Fish - Out and About -- This is only the 2nd time we've seen a toad fish outside of its hole. Very rare footage.

Last Day of Diving in Cozumel 2010

It has been a super week of diving in the beautiful waters of Cozumel. Sadly we have completed our final dives of this trip spending a little over one hour on Columbia Reef and then just over 90 minutes on Columbia Shallows Reef. Columbia Shallows is (as its name implies) a shallow dive, mostly less than 25 feet deep but it is amazingly beautiful. We hope you enjoy these final posts from these two dives. We salute our excellent Dive Master, Julio, and all the fine staff at Dive Paradise for another great diving experience. We will try to upload some short videos when we arrive back in the U.S.

Again, please leave comments.

Mulit-Level Flower Worm (Reva) She also has a movie of this worm in action!

Four Lurking Baracuda (Reva)
Peacock Flounder (Mitch) Also have a movie of this flounder flittering off into the sunset.

Male Parrot Fish - Finally some good color! (Mitch)

Beautiful Purple Arrow Shrimp (Reva)

Pipe Fish (Mitch)

Pipe Fish, up close and personal. Can you find his snout? (Mitch)

Golden Eel (Reva), She has a knack for finding eel.

Anemone Crab (Mitch)

Star Fish (Reva)

Brown Hind (Mitch)

Splendid Toad Fish (Reva)

We've now completed dives 16 and 17 on this trip to beautiful Cozumel. Today we dove Plantanca Gardens (down to 119') and Chhankanab Ballones (about 70'). We saw both large and small critters, but amazingly no turtles today. We saw some hugh Grouper. Be sure to look all the way to the end today for a look at just how big.

Enjoy, and please leave a comment. Last dives, and last post will be tomorrow. :(

Two Sea Snails (approx. 1 inch long) (Mitch)

Purple Fan Coral (Mitch)
Lettuce Nudibranch (approx. 1" long) - Can you find his antenni? (Reva)

4" Blister Worm (Reva)

Flower Worm - about 3" across- the bloom retracts when approached (Reva)

18-20" Parrot Fish - their color is hard to capture. This one is fair. (Mitch)

Small conch (2") in Sponge (Reva)

On our 2nd dive, we met this. Could it be drug trafficers from Ecuador, J.K. coming to visit, or the sightseeing submarine "Atlantis"? (Mitch)This is photo of a nurse shark and a BIG grouper. Can you find the grouper? (Mitch)

To give you some idea of the size of the fish, here is Mitch within an arms length of the Grouper (did you find it?) (Reva)