Diving!

So, the advanced course was much cooler than the original open water course and has managed to further cement my newfound desire to go diving...constantly. The open water course was great because it was all pretty new, but not until my last 7 dives did I get into the exciting stuff. An underwater navigation dive and a deep water dive are necessary for your advanced certification, as well as three electives. For mine, I chose night diving, peak performance buoyancy and underwater photography (mainly because I just wanted some pictures to take back with me) . I also did a shipwreck dive (very cool...went down 30 metres to a sunken cargo ship) and two fun dives, where I puttered around and basically looked at fish. The night diving was a blast, puts a totally new slant on everything that you see in the day time, saw an octopus and lots of sleeping fish, although we weren't supposed to, I would flash my light on them and watch them sluggishly open their eyes and slowly swim away, it was great. Peak performance buoyancy is a dive devoted to maintaining perfect neutral bouyancy, swimming upside down, using your lungs instead of the air from your tank to move vertically in the water etc, lots of good info in that one! The scariest dive I did was actually a fun dive. We went to a place on the far side of the island called Ghost Waters. Off the boat we descended about 14 metres, then swam along a little shelf to the edge of a drop off that plummeted a staggering 2 kilometres straight down to the ocean floor. My dive master then had the insane idea of going OVER the edge, which, being my buddy, I had to obey. So we dropped down and swam over a 2km drop. Periodically I would look down into the blackness of the abyss and see all sorts of hideous monsters watching me, although I think this was more a product of the excess nitrogen build-up in my brain rather than any actual beasts. Although I DID hear the odd groan floating up from the depths. Im still not sure what produced the sounds, but they were very quiet but deep and sounded like the bottom of the ocean was trying to communicate with me. Given my built in fear of deep waters, this was all a very troubling experience, but at the same time the adrenaline rush it gave me was well worth the fear. We finished our diving with a great little jaunt a few kilometres off the coast to a place called Black Hills, where a huge mountain rises up just below the surface of the ocean. As soon as we arrived, massive schools of fish surrounded us and at points were so thick that we could barely see past them. My instructor insisted that they often do this, but Im still convinced they did it especially just for me. So now that both Ryan and I are advanced open water divers, our work here is done and it is time to move on! Tomorrow morning we leave bright and early for the coast, then hop on a bus to Tegucigalpa (Im recalling that name from memory so its probably spelled incorrectly). Hopefully we can make it past the Nicaraguan border by tomorrow afternoon and then we're headed for Leon. Bay Islands have been fantastic but it's definitely time for a change in scenery. Probably update again once we're in Grenada! (the city...not the island...although who knows...) Adios!

Pictures! First shot...I meant to take a shot of the water, but this stupid turtle got in the way
Second shot...French angel fish, unfortunately that isnt a great shot of them because at the time there were hundreds more in the school, but I was too zoomed in! Each one of them is about a foot long or so
Third shot...A parrot fish that came by for a visit, we had a wonderful conversation about underwater politics...did I mention the weird things that nitrogen does to you at 100+ feet?
Fourth shot...Not sure what that fish is called...