Diving Friday Oct 29 at Freestyle, DIbba Rock, and on Saturday Oct 30 in Musandam with Nomad Ocean Adventures

My logged dives #1015-1018

Friday Oct 29, 2010, Dibba Rock with Freestyle Divers

On Friday, a bunch of us met at Freestyle Divers before noon.  We tried a new extension to 611 built to the new airport in Dubai and it saved us 30 min drive time, so we arrived at the new Lulu in Dibba around 10:30 and even with the ladies buying everything  they thought looked tasty (for a half dozen breakfasts and lunches more than we needed, bless ‘em) we arrived at Freestyle an hour before we were due to be diving.  We met Jim and Mira Bakey and their tall son Michael there, Nicki had ridden up with Ian and his daughter Eva, and Joan and Dusty were with Bobbi and I for a group of 10.

Ian was taking my open water course but by now he had located his missing dive card, his daughter had brought it from UK, and he was finally able to show it to me, so he still wanted to complete my o/w course but now that he’d verified his prior training, he is actually good to dive independently.  His daughter Eva had just certified in February with Greg Heinrich’s but had not dived since, so on our way out to the boat from the Freestyle beach,  I took her underwater  and ran her through the skill set of mask clearing, alternate air source breathing, and reg recovery and replacement, and she did fine.  But as we descended on that dive, I kept an eye on her and made sure she was weighted properly. Joan had got a weight off me right at the start, and Mira too had trouble getting down and needed a kilo.  But Eva didn’t need my 3rd weight till the very end, and throughout the dive she kept herself right at my shoulder.

Unfortunately it wasn’t the best day for Dibba Rock.  The front side was quite crowded, there were a couple of Al Boom boats there.  Too many divers keeps the animals away, and the sun overhead reflected off the suspended matter and made the haze more pronounced.  I didn’t realize that the mooring we went down was right on the reef so I swam west a little and found the coral sparse, so then continued west to find the aquarium, nice fishes there, pretty diving and relatively relaxed and clear.  From there I could orient on the reef proper by swimming due east, but we hit some back current and found it rough going when trying to turn east at the tip of the V.  So I led us back the way we had come, just trying to keep the divers together and stay on the coral patch. 

It was when I came out on the mooring we had started on that I realized that mooring was on the reef.  That was good to know because Hasan had come down for the 3 pm dive and was waiting for us on shore when the boat came back.  It was his first dive ever, but he’d done well in the pool and I had encouraged him to make the trip after completing only just one module. We had plenty of time to prepare.  I would be his buddy.

I convinced Nicki to join us on the 3 pm dive by promising her a back-of-the-island dive.  Eva decided not to make the trip so it was just the 3 Bakeys and Joan and Dusty, Bobbi and Nicki, and Ian and Hasan and I.  When the boatman pulled to the backside drop off, I insisted on mooring because Hasan wasn’t ready for a free descent, but the boatman was unable to due to the exposed rocks there.  Nicki wanted to dive there regardless so I asked Bobbi to join her.  The Bakeys decided to go in there as well, and then Ian said he’d like to start there too. Ian was fun diving and not in student mode that day since he still had the last two pool modules to do before he could do the last two dives of his course, so sure, he could join in if he wanted.  Bobbi could at this point have opted to come with Hasan and I since Nicki had plenty of company, but she decided to leave the boring front side of the island to Hasan and I.

So Hasan and I were dropped in on the mooring we had visited at noon, which I now knew to be right on the reef we wanted to be on, and this dive was not boring.  For one thing, the angle of the afternoon sun and slight overcast removed the sunbeams from the water, so we could see better than at noon.  And apart from Iva and a few divers he was training in peak buoyancy (they tend to stay in one spot), we were the only ones there. It was not long before we found a shark, and I swam after it and made sure Hasan saw it well and up close.  We meandered the reef looking for more and ended up in the aquarium where there were schools of fusiliers and snappers and the schools of fish with gaping mouths that all snap shut in unison.  We saw pufferfish there and tangs and parrots and actually I could name almost all the fish in the handbook.  Then we headed west to the reef and saw our second shark there, might have been the same one.  We wheeled over the reef taking it easy now.  Hasan was on his first dive and has a lot to learn about weighting and buoyancy control.  At this point he was awkward in the water, expending a lot of energy in hand motions, and half an hour into the dive he was down to the red, so I suggested we just stay where we were for a bit.  A couple of minutes later a large 2 meter Spanish mackerel passed nearby.  We ascended from there, pretty satisfied with ourselves after that one.

Hasan had to get back to Dubai and work the next morning, so he left after the one dive (one of the best of the weekend for me!)  The rest of us cleaned up our kit and headed over the border to the Mauritian hospitality of Chris and his family at Nomad Ocean Adventure.  Beverages were in evidence when Ian and I headed for the pool to complete module 4 there.  We had to delay drinks gratification until forced to stop and come to dinner, grilled kingfish and pasta with shrimps, plenty of salad, a variety of quiches, et quelquechose rouge.  After a very convivial meal ensemble, people headed for bed early, and Bobbi and I slept more than 8 hours, when I got up at 8 to meet Ian in the pool and complete module 5 there.

Saturday Oct 30, 2010, Musandam with Nomad Ocean Adventures

Unfortunately Ian had an issue at work come up and couldn’t join us for the dive.  There had been a storm in Oman the day before and communications both phone and internet were not working on the Oman side of the border.  Ian was having to cross into the UAE to keep in touch with his office and as we were loading the boat he informed us that he and Eva would have to head out.  This left us down to 11 divers on our boat, as we’d had two added, Richard the French instructor who sometimes uses a rebreather, and his lady friend Allison who doesn’t, so when Richard dives with her he uses conventional equipment. 

However the lack of communications led to our herding people onto our boat before they were comfortably ready only to wait there for a captain who didn’t come, no one could call him.  After we had assembled our tanks for the first dive and sat for a quarter hour with no one around to help, I returned to the dive center and got Chris on the case, and eventually Sultan appeared, in his finest white pressed dishdash, since he’d been called away from a Saturday family affair.  Unfortunately Richard and Allison had left by then, not wishing to wait, but on the upside we’d been joined by Jonathan who had arranged to come down from Dubai but was a little late, so we had gone ahead, since he couldn’t reach us by phone, so we had no idea if he had got waylaid or what, but he managed to find us the way we always accomplished these hookups before mobiles became ubiquitous, somehow.

Sultan has captained out boat before, he’s a nice guy, always helps us with our gear and takes us where we want to go, even when we change our minds, so we were all back on even keel as we sped up to Lima Rock in the bright sunlight, the mountains of Musandam rising from the very sea in limestone formations speckled with under water alcoves and strewn with boulder swim-throughs.

By 1 pm we were descending for our first dive on the south side of Lima.  I had gone in and checked so I knew there was a current, one that pulled east toward Iran at that end of the island (take that one you might need a visa) and west toward Lima headland at the other end. We had gone to the north side of the island but found dhows and dozens of divers sheltering in the relative calm there, so we’d moved to the south side where we prefer to dive and decided to start midisland and put ourselves in the west current.

I briefed everyone about rounding the island, though not everyone got that far.  The dive itself wasn’t that interesting, poor vis, a few morays and crayfish, and lots of batfish being cleaned by wrasse, interesting to watch, the batfish seem to really enjoy it.  Nicki said she saw a huge Spanish mackerel resting on the bottom but I was tending to the divers.  Jim and Mira Bakey were first to show me low air and head up so I took charge of their son.  But he was at about 70 bar and everyone else I could still see had over a hundred.  So I led us up to 12 meters.  We caught the current and I led higher.  As we reached the end of the island we popped over some algae encrusted rocks at just 5 meters, and  sent Michael, by then below 50, up to the surface we could see rippling right overhead. Joan and Dusty and my buddy Bobbi followed me back down to 15 meters. And we continued in pleasant temperatures through the schools of fish on the north side of the island until we agreed to come up to safety stop depth, and when my computer reached 60 minutes I pointed this out to Nicki, who showed me 56, because her buddy had had a delay at the surface at the start of the dive, so I signaled Bobbi to join her, and I took Joan and Dusty up, as we were all getting low on air and I had admonished everyone not to dive overtime, or we’d assume they were missing and mount a rescue.

Everyone seemed to enjoy that dive and we were heading to Wonder Wall in the direction of home when I noticed Pearl Island about to go out of sight behind Ras Lima and I thought, and then actually said, why not there? The only time we’d dived it Bobbi and I had been led by Michael Diver (Facebook moniker, different Michael from the one we had with us) and we had met fierce currents.  It had been a difficult dive.  We’d had current at 1:00 but possibly it would have slacked by 3:00, and I thought I could recall the route (though not the direction which I thought was north, but I figured out during the dive that it was actually east).  All the divers still with us seemed up to the challenge.

The boatman pulled us behind the island where the new instructor Philip in another Nomad boat was just then taking down a group of open water students; likely he’d not be going where we were headed. We finished our sandwiches and kitted up and entered the water.  Vis was not great, maybe 7 meters or so.  Fortunately there was hardly any current to impact us as we headed north into the channel and then rounded the island to the east.  I wasn’t sure where I was but it looked familiar.  There were lots of grey morays in the rocks but I was looking for the fishpots that would lead us to the submerged islands to the (I now realized) east. At 16 meters I found them and followed their ropes over the sand.  About 20-30 meters out I saw a submerged outcrop looming to the south, so the heading was a little south of those ropes.

The sunken islands were fun and foreboding, teeming with fish life.  Going from one to another Michael noticed three rays on top of one and tried to get my attention but neither I nor the others saw them (and Dusty surmised they were actually batfish).  We picked up a current coming to the third one but got some relief from it as we rounded on the south and took the channel to the north down to 18 meters.  Here we found the hulking barracuda we had seen the time before.

The barracuda like current so it was a stiff fin into it to head back to the west the way we had come.  We lost Jim and Mira on this maneuver but again we had Michael with us, and Joan and Dusty, and Bobbi and I.  Nicky and Jonathan had not been seen since we headed east toward the sunken islands.  I presumed that any missing buddy pairs were enjoying themselves and caring for one another.

In the last part of the dive we passed one area where barracudas were visible at depth and schools of snappers were pouring off the rocks above. We finished up following a shoulder that rose to 5 meters, a good place for a safety stop.  There was lots of cabbage coral here, a favorite haunt of turtles though we didn’t see any.  It was really a beautiful dive, nice to get to know a new spot.

Whalesharks Two by Two

Nicki has sent me a most remarkable photo.  It's a picture of me neutrally buoyantly enjoying one of our recent whaleshark encounters at Lima Rock.

Hang on a minute!  She noticed something in this photo.  In the upper part of the pic just to the left of the bubbles.  See it? ...

Diving in Musandam October 15 and Dibba October 16, 2010

My logged dives #1011-1014

Friday Oct 15, 2010

Dusty and Joan are visiting so we planned a weekend for them to do their first dive of their visit with us.  We intended to stay in Oman at (Discover) Nomad Ocean Adventure on Friday and move to Freestyle on Saturday, but NOA was fully booked for accommodation, though there was plenty of space for diving.  So we rented two apartments at Seaside in Dibba and filled them with Dusty, Joan, Bobbi, and I in one, and Rami and Nicole, fellow hashers and friends with Nicki at SKMC in the other, along with Nicki herself, and Ian, who was a certified diver back in 1985, though neither PADI UK nor PADI California could find a record of it.  He had been referred by Jay to do a refresher with me but was happy to convert to a full fledged open water course at the last minute due to the certification limbo. The problem was that at the last minute, the best we could do to get him in the water was for him to swing by our place at 5:45 a.m., me to ride up with him and administer his first three exams in the car, and then get him in the pool at 9:30 for module 1 confined water, which we finished just in time to await technical instructor Glenn from http://www.coastaltechnicaldivers.com/ and his double-tank divers to join us on the boat for an 11:00 a.m. departure for Lima Rock.

It was a glorious day.  Air temperatures in the UAE are approaching benign, seas were mild, and the mountains rising straight up along the coast in Musandam glistened in the sunlight.  Water temperatures were ideal too.  I wore a 3 mm suit with holes in the back covered by a rash vest on top, and I was perfectly comfortable.  Michael was conducting the operation and leading the dives, so I didn’t have to select sites or take responsibility for anyone but my student, all the other divers in our group being advanced or rescue.

Ian hadn’t been diving in the past 25 years, so Lima might have been a little challenging for a first dive after so long.  Michael was trying to accommodate the tech divers who were looking for 42 meters, as well as my group wanting to stay shallow, so he chose what I would have, Lima south side, and started the dive in the shelter of a cove where it was easy for everyone to assemble on the surface out of the current. However, the current was pulling to the west, as was reported by the tech divers when they went in first, so I would possibly have moved my group to the north side of the island.  But Michael made the best call under the circumstances and all started well.  

It was a nice dive, comfortable water conditions, mild current to the west, but picking up as we started to get caught in it.  Ian was staying a little high in the water and I kept calling him down, and the first couple of times he responded.  So I thought he was weighted correctly if he was able to get back down, so I didn’t offer him any of the extra three kilos I was wearing.  But then a combination of factors caused Ian to abort his dive 22 minutes into it.  He was getting very high up in the water as the current swept us along when Michael led the group in a right turn fight against the current and headed around the island to find gentler conditions on the north side to the east.  At that time Ian was going into a slow rise to the surface, too far off the rock and susceptible to the westerly current, quite powerful at either end of the island. With some concern I tried to call him back, but saw him reach the surface. At least he was safe there, but he was now in the current that carries divers way to the west of the rock.

I had been trying to get him to rejoin me at about 16 meters.  I wanted him to come to me because for me to have gone up with him would have meant the end of both our dives, but now I had to do that, so I headed up slowly, minding the admonitions on my computer to take it easy, and finning to stay as close as possible to the rock, though I too was being swept off it.  After a couple of minutes I reached the surface and looked around.  I didn’t see Ian right away, but I saw our boat halfway between there and Lima Headland, a few hundred meters from where I was, and Ian was by the boat, being recovered.  He waved to me, I waved back.  I knew that instructor Glenn was there and Ian was being looked after.

So could I continue my dive? It was a long shot and I was being swept by a westerly current, but I finned back into it for all I was worth.  Here’s where weekly ten km runs pays off. With some duress I was able to make progress against it.  I was being pushed to the north by its northwesterly torque but as I came even with the island I got some relief and then I was able to approach the island and find bubbles.  I snorkeled along with the bubbles for a minute catching my breath, and when I recovered my respiration I descended and joined the divers.

So we completed a nice dive.  We saw several big honeycomb morays on that one, and Michael pointed out two pairs of nudibranchs, well spotted.  Nicky called us over to look at a spot of sand.  When we got there wondering what she was on about she waved her hand over it and uncovered a torpedo electric ray (had she covered it with sand before calling us? We’ll never know …). 

At 40 min into the dive, with Michael still leading at 18 meters, I had gone up to 15, where Nicole indicated she had 50 bar and wanted to surface. I showed her I had 50 as well (I had just a 12 liter tank).  I led Nicole and Rami steadily up the rock face and found some coral with placid schools of fish to hang out near at 5 meters for a three minute safety stop, surfacing at 48 minutes.

People in our group wanted to go to Ras Morovi for a second dive but Michael wanted to take us to Ras Lima.  Others in the boat objected to that choice as well so Michael agreed to Wonder Wall, which is usually a nice dive.  We started on the wall but Ian and I headed out over the sand to find rays (none there). We found big submerged boulders instead, inviting us to look for whatever else these subaqua features might have attracted.  We got down to 18 meters on our dive and spent it cruising among the boulders.  I don't remember so much from a wildlife standpoint on that dive, but it was pleasant and lasted about 45 minutes.  I ended mine in a required safety stop.


We returned to Dibba and Ian and I went into the pool to do confined modules 1 and 2.  Due to Ian's past diving experience we got through it quickly.  The others had gone on ahead into Dibba UAE to heat the chili Nicki had brought on the Seaside Apartments hotplate.  We passed by the hole in the wall on our way and returned to the Seaside for a grand communal meal in the cramped living room of our apartment.  The bedrooms were spacious though and we managed a decent rest before having to get under way at 8 a.m. for our next day diving.


Saturday Oct 16, 2010


Rami and Nicole had to get back to Abu Dhabi so it was just Nicki, Joan, Dusty, Bobbi, and Ian and I who turned up at Freestyle for the 9 a.m. dive on a gorgeous Saturday morning.


On this day, Ian was able to do one dive toward his course having completed through module 3 in confined water, and we did it on our first dive on the reef at Dibba Rock.  He and I dived together.  The others went to the back side of the rock and rounded to the other side, but Ian and I began in the aquarium exploring the rust colored porite coral, cruising shallow 3 to 5 meters.  We found a turtle to the south of the island that didn't seem to mind if we hovered nearby and then we went west toward the raspberry coral (now more accurately a patch of brown coral rubble). Still life is bouncing back there.  We found barracuda there and, always on the lookout for sharks here, I saw two.  The first one came right up to me before noticing me and swimming away to my left.  Ian was unfortunately just far enough behind at that moment to not be able to see it.  I saw the second as I was making my way back to the east to end in the aquarium.  Finning hard to chase after him I pointed its direction for tens of seconds, but Ian didn't know what to look for in the haze at the edge of the visibility there, so he missed that one too.


But next dive with Ian (fun diving), Bobbi and Joan and Dusty and Nicki and I found more turtles and half a dozen sharks.  This time Ian saw the sharks.  It seemed they were coming out of everywhere.  I did a decent navigation on the reef as well.  It's getting harder to find now that it's shrunk and shriveled due to cyclone and red tide.  We started in the aquarium and repeated our dive to the west to find the reef, and then moved south where we found the first few sharks.  I managed the turn to the east and led the divers to the end of the reef there.  They seemed to want to continue on but I corralled them and got them moving back west the way we had come.  50 min into the dive Nicki wanted to be a good customer and surface, but we had been one of the first groups in and I figured we could stay down a little longer, so she agreed to 5 more minutes.  That was a good thing because Ian and I found our one last shark who came at us from the sand and wheeled around us in such a way as to attract the attention of Bobbi who pointed down to show the others who were sort of heading for the surface by then.  Lovely dive that one, plenty of sharks for all to see, and a great way to end a weekend.

Certified Advanced o/w diver Vince Cording in Musandam October 1 and Dibba October 2, 2010

My logged dives #1006-1010

Diving with: Bobbi of course, Vince (advanced o/w training), Channin (whom I recently certified as o/w), Keith and January (whom I recently certified as Advanced o/w), and our mutual friend Joe (PADI advanced). Jay (whom I recently certified as Advanced o/w) came down on Saturday to dive with us at Freestyle.

One of my recently certified open water diving students Vince decided to carry on as soon as possible with his advanced course and he engaged me to put together a program that had us start the weekend Friday Oct 1 at Nomad Ocean Adventures with two dives in Musandam. NOA are now running night dives in Musandam, so we planned one as a third dive on Friday, followed on Saturday by a deep dive on the Inchcape wreck from Freestyle divers, and then a navigation dive on Dibba Rock.

Having set it all up as requested and recruited the others aboard, we pulled out from All Prints at 6:30 sharp on Friday morning but due to some mis-turns we arrived a little late at Nomad. Channin rode with us and Vince followed in his car. January and Keith and Joe Broeker were on their way in a third car.

We were assigned to Michael’s boat, first time I’ve dived with him. He’s a nice guy and a competent leader, so we didn’t mind so much when he changed the dives sites as we entered the Lima area. He had said we were going first to Ras Morovi and then to Pearl Island. I didn’t know Pearl Island but he said it would be a good place for navigation, so on the trip out I briefed Vince on deep and navigation dives for that day.

But on the approach to Lima Michael signaled the boat to stop short at Wonder Wall and announced we’d do our first dive there. We like Wonder Wall but it has a sloping bottom and wouldn’t be quite the same as a deep dive where there’s a drop, so Michael suggested we get the boatman to take us off the point where we could drop to 28 meters there. But the current in that case would take us quickly past the end of the dive and we’d have to just come up after the bounce, so Vince and I decided to go with the group on the shallower dive and leave the advanced deep dive for the next morning.

It was a nice dive. Vince was impressed with the live corals and abundant sea life, different from the dying reef at Dibba. At one point we found an electric torpedo ray in the sand, and there were lots of morays, some swimming around the coral dollops. Toward the end of the dive we let ourselves get swept along the wall toward the point. The first diver was low on air at 40 minutes so I found a shelter from the current and led everyone up to a safety stop at 5 meters. Vince and I had got down to 20 meters at the start of that dive.

Michael announced the second dive for Lima Rock, which I didn’t think would be good for navigation, so Vince and I decided to make these two dives boat and underwater naturalist. Michael headed the boat for Lima and rounded it, but then headed the boat for Pearl Island, which got me thinking about navigation again. Pearl Island is the point with a small island off it between Ras Lima and Ras Morovi. I’d never dived it before and Michael’s surface interval description of the dive made Vince and I want to do it with Michael leading.

When we all entered the water we found we’d have to fight our way north against a stiff current, good thing we weren’t planning navigation, impossible here in those conditions.In the water we found another torpedo ray (Vince had missed the first one and was glad to see this one). We found scorpion fish and a moray wriggling toward us along the sand. The dive plan was to round the island at the north, hence the struggle up-current, and on the north easterly heading we were looking for 4 fish pots. At this point if vis had been good we would have seen a submerged ‘island’ and beyond that another. As it was, we followed Michael, who led us where the fish life became interesting. Vince and I found a big crayfish lobster trying to back into a rock ledge. Most interesting was a school of a few dozen barracudas hanging in the current where it wheeled to the north and prevented us from rounding the island to the south. I found a rope and pulled myself into the current alongside the barracudas. That was cool but we could not proceed against the current so we headed back the way we had come. People’s air was getting low by then. Vince and I surfaced after 40 minutes, having got down to 16 meters or so.

We headed back to port talking about where we would do the night dive. Christophe had said we could go to Pearl Island though it was distant from Dibba, because there was red tide at the caves, the nearest option. But Pearl Island would not be good at night with current blasting the way it was. I thought perhaps the cove at Ras Morovi, but it was further still than Pearl Island. On the boat ride back I thought we should give Fishhead Rock a look. As we slowed down we could see there was red tide there. But I thought maybe it was clear at depth, so I went in with mask, fins, and snorkel and found that the algae was only a meter deep. I pronounced it fit for a night dive, and after returning to port and relaxing an hour over coffee at the dive center, we found our way back there after night had fallen.

There were four of us, Vince and I and Piotr, a student on a protracted course with NOA for whom this would be his last advanced dive so I was asked if I wanted to certify him. There was also a new instructor at NOA whom they wanted to send on the trip, so the four of us boarded the boat and headed out on the half hour trip north at dusk with skies afire over the fijords and mountains to Fishhead Rock.

It would be an interesting dive. I had the boatman search for the rock jutting out of the water that I wanted us to go down on, just as Vince and I had done a couple of weeks previously with Fares and Veronique. We got everyone briefed and in the water and with the help of our lights, over to the rock, not easy to find in the dark. Once there we used the rock for orientation to slip beneath the waves into the algae murk. Thankfully, the water cleared only a couple meters down and we settled onto the bottom where we found a rock to have Piotr do his compass heading back and forth from. It turned out to be like a lot of rocks in that area and I got confused, but Piotr felt he’d found his way just fine.  Vince followed that with his own compass work..

We found the overhang that looks like a cave but that we know has ways out overhead and we went in there. It’s spacious and interesting at night, lots of crevices to poke lights into. There were no rays but it made a fun maze. We went from the entry at 12 meters up to 5 looking for the exits but when I realized I couldn’t see them at night I reversed direction and retraced the way we had come.

On the outside we found squids dancing in our light beams, then switched those off to thrash our arms in the dark to make them sparkle with phosphorescence. Then I led us up into the bottom reaches of the algae for a 5 meter safety stop, taking us up to our specified dive time of 40 minutes.

Piotr said he thought the dive was “very interesting.” Vince felt that his first night dive, in comparison with those we’d been doing by day, was “Exactly the same, but totally different.” Well put!

Back at Nomad we enjoyed bbq tuna and chicken a la Mauritius cooked by Sylviane, who is back in charge of the kitchen, yum yum. We relaxed over smuggled beverages and slept exhaustedly.

In the morning we moved across the border to Freestyle Divers for another great day of diving. Temperatures were hot in the sun but comfortable in the shade where we kitted for our deep Inchcape wreck dive. January, Keith, and Joe were doing their first 30 meter dive, as was Vince, so I made sure everyone got a thorough briefing. Fortune smiled on us as we entered the water and found no current at all, so it was an easy swim to the mooring line. With some initial clumsiness on initial descent being overcome in good order by my good diving friends and buddies, we all arrived at the bottom safely.

Vince and I got there first, and we had a look around the boat, found an electric torpedo ray at the bottom near the bow, and explored the other side, finding eventually the two resident honeycomb moray resident eels. I put Vince through the paces with the cognitive test and comparison of depth gauges. Eventually we hooked up with the others. At 17 minutes into the dive, I was getting half tank signals, and all agreed to the thumbs up and slow ascent up the mooring line, greeted at all stages by batfish.

Meanwhile Bobbi had opted to dive Dibba Rock in a boat with only three people, and in the only boat on the rock that early in the morning. She and Channin, and Jay who had driven down for the day, had a great dive in the aquarium. The three of them each had a shark to play with. Bobbi says the sharks came pretty much right up to them, right in their faces, and stayed with them till they got bored with them (Bobbi says). They saw turtles as well.

That sounded like a neat dive, but when we returned to the spot at 1 pm there were too many people in the water by then and no sharks to be found. Vince and I ran up a submersible marker buoy and went through the advanced dive ritual, calibrating fin kicks and time for 30 meters, all based at the buoy. We did a compass heading to the west and left a plastic cup there, then returned on reciprocal heading to base at the SMB. Next we did a square pattern that took us en route to where we could collect the plastic cup and return one last time to the buoy, which we collected.

We finished our navigation in the nick of time because by then the current was picking up. We let it carry us over the reef but eventually beat our way back up current to come out at the aquarium. There the current was less evident, but no sharks were evident either. Vince and I looked around and when he got down to 50 bar we let ourselves be carried back over the raspberry coral patch (doesn’t look like raspberry anymore ).

We spotted a grand two-meter Spanish mackerel on that last pass, but no sharks. It was a relaxing dive, great compass work by Vince, leading to his certification as an advanced o/w diver.

Certified o/w divers Vince, Fares, and Véronique in Musandam Sept 11 and Dibba Rock Sept 12, 2010

My logged dives #1002-1005

For Bobbi and I, this was our first chance to go diving after summer vacation, done during the Eid al Fitr following Ramadhan 2010.  I'd been working with 3 dive students since returning from summer holidays: Vince the army vet with some prior diving experience, and Fares and Véronique, Syrian / French couple, also nice people and comfortable in water. We managed to finish their pool and academic work before the Eid holiday, but the only night that Discover Nomad could accommodate us was Saturday Sept 11 so we scheduled our open water diving for that day and the one after.  Following the most convenient boat departure schedules, we chose to sleep till 5 on Saturday morning and drive up to Dibba to arrive before 10 a.m for one of Discover Nomad's late departures for Musandam, finish off the pool work in the Discover Nomad pool before dinner that night, sleep comfortably in the luxury hostel accommodation, and then dive with Freestyle next day at 9 with the final dive of the course at noon, so we could be collecting gear left off for servicing in Dubai at about the time the Discover Nomad boat would be returning that evening to the harbor in Dibba, Oman.

Saturday saw a number of inauspicious occurances.  We were a little late leaving the house and compounded that by hitting dense fog where the new Yas Island road meets the Dubai highway. Blinded, we took a wrong turn before regaining our way, losing time.  Then at the border with Musandam Oman I was almost denied exit from UAE because my visa had expired; I had to beg to be let out (no Oman border post to challenge my entry).  When we reached Discover Nomad, before 10 as expected, we discovered we were waiting on people yet to arrive from Dubai.  The timing turned out ok because my students could take their time choosing their gear, and I used the last part of the wait to brief them over coffee and tea.  Still it was 11 before we were able to leave for the harbor and 11:30 before the boatman appeared on board our loaded boat.  Finally on our way, but still within site of Dibba harbor, the engines started acting up, and the boatmen killed the engines to check it out..

I tried speaking to the boatmen about the problem and Fares eventually intervened, but there were dialectical differences making it difficult for us to understand in Arabic. When the boatmen turned back for the harbor, we weren't sure whether we were returning to get another boat or aborting the trip.  Our impression was that they were aborting the trip so we asked to be taken at slow speed further up the coast, and as long as it wasn't all the way to Lima Rock, they agreed to the compromise.  We were within site of the caves when we resumed our journey, but on just one 115 hp engine it took us a tedious half hour to get just even with the caves, normally 15 min out of Dibba, and another half hour at least to reach what I call Fishhead Rock, the most salient Ras about halfway to Lima.  From Fishhead Rock, on a clear day, which this was, you can see Lima low on the horizon, half an hour distant in a fully functioning boat, but over an hour away on the one we were stuck on now.

I had asked to be taken to Fishhead Rock because I had dived there long ago with BSAC divers and I remember it had swim-throughs which the BSAC divers sometimes went out of their way to dive.  But it had been some time so I was guessing on where exactly we should begin our dive.  At the rock, I went in to check current and found a drift to the north.  Also as we were kitting up the boat was moved to the north, but sometimes that's a wind effect. So when we started diving I was mildly annoyed to find the bottom current to be to the south, but we had told the boatman we were going North, so we stuck to that.

With first time divers I like to give them clear reference for their first descent, but this was going to be a wall dive and could present a disorienting drop, so I asked the boatman to take us to a rock that was poking out of the water thinking that might provide reference on that crucial first ascent.  It was steeper than I'd hoped but I'd already had my newbies check their weights by entering the water wearing weights and wetsuits, just climbing down the ladder before kitting up, so we were sure they had enough weight to at least pull down the wetsuits.  I was carrying extra kilos and I dispensed these as needed on the dive, so we got everyone correctly weighted and avoided over-buoyancy issues.

This was all very important so as to minimize risk of surprises on this first entry. So much can happen to beginning divers. Ear problems preventing timely descent is common for example, and a diver with ear problems being pulled down by too much weight and lack of reference is the worst that can happen, so it's vitally important to control for these eventualities, but difficult when the choice of dive sight is dictated by where you end up due to engine failure.  In any event, all went well. Fares even refused weight the first time I offered it, preferring to work out his buoyancy problem with lung volume, a very good sign.

The swim-throughs were numerous; one seemed almost like a cave, but with light and vertical access easily reachable. I shined my light in the dark corners and found a medium size cow tail ray hiding and resting in the darkness there.  He squirmed at the intrusion so we left him to finish his nap and moved on through the labyrinth.  I was pleased at the buoyancy control of my trainees, who were able to navigate where I led them.

As happens on a first dive, my students' air ran out in 40 minutes, at which point Bobbi was pointing at a turtle swimming in midwater.  The turtle circled the ascending divers, finned for the surface for a gulp of air, and then plunged to escape our further notice. The dive had lasted from 2 pm to 2:40, and I don't think anyone went below 14 meters.

Our boat limped into the nearest khor where a dhow had already disgorged its boatload of Eid frolickers, but there was plenty of room for all there.  The Dubai crowd swam while I put my students through surface skills, out on a compass heading, snorkel reg exchange (exhausting, so ;-) cramp removal and tired diver tows back to the boat.  I organized the Dubai people and our boatmen for a 4 pm departure.  Our second dive would be at the caves, a half hour south on the single engine.

We were diving there by 5 p.m.  We had worked out our allowable time on tables to be 45 min at 18 meters or 59 at 16, and we didn't come close to either depth.  As this was o/w dive #2 we had skills to perform.  My plan was to look for the cave (more like a tunnel) and if we found it and went through it (there would be light visible the other side at all times) we would do our skills on the far side.  As with January and Keith the last time I had come here, we had no better luck finding the cave entrance, but we found the crawfish in the rocks just outside.  We did our skills there and then moved to the back side of the cave where I hoped to find the exit.  But that plan didn't work either and we had kind of a plain vanilla dive with surge and me on a mission to find that ellusive cave, which I've dived many times with others and was never aware it was hidden till last two times trying to find it on my own.  Véronique was not feeling well from the boating, and opted to leave the water early with Bobbi.  After supervising their exit, Fares and Vince and I redescended to do compass work at depth and ascend with alternate air source (Véronique had to do hers later).  I think my diving lasted about 45 min, to maybe 14 meters.

With the boat moving so slowly it took almost an hour to return to harbor and it was dusk when we arrived.  This put us back at the dive center late, so it was 8 when we started work on our last two confined water modules.  We missed dinner but the Discover Nomad staff had kindly kept aside a good portion of fish so we were able to relax with good food and beverage afterwards.

Next morning we moved over to our good friends at Freestyle on the UAE side of Dibba (the officer at the border said no problem when I pointed out that I realized I was trying to reentre the country on an expired visa).  It was a fine day for diving Dibba, not too hot, and lovely in the water it turned out, viz not all that bad.  I started Vince on his CESA first thing and then collected the others for oral inflation at the bottom of the mooring followed by mask flooding / clearing.

Then the fun dive began with the looming, clacking reef.  I was at an unfamiliar mooring (again) and found myself at the edge of the real reef but not sure due to the way it has mostly turned to rubble.  To our left was sand and coral outcrops that looked like they led to the aquarium, so I took that way.  The aquarium is what I call the rust colored porite coral where the water is usually clear and the fish abound.  Near some jagged ourcrops I decided this would be a good place to do compass work so I sent Véronique to the north and had her return south, and Fares followed suit.  Then we moved along the aquarium and admired the schools of jacks and fusiliers.  We found ourselves heading toward the back side, moving with the current, and heading to depth, so when Véronique signalled 100 bar, I decided to commit to it.  So I led north over sand bottom looking for rays, found none, returned south, looked for jawfish, found none.  Bobbi said she found a moray on the dive, Véronique saw a scorpion fish, and Angelika from Munich said later there were lots of lion fish there, but I'm finding the back side of Dibba more a wasteland compared to what life used to thrive there.  I hope it's coming back.  We ended our dive at about 40 min, having reached 16 meters in the sand.

Now we were down to the completion of a long weekend course with only two CESAs to do, mask removal and replacement, and hovering.  Hovering would be easy on the front side reef, since hovering is the way to observe what's going on there, and my divers requested the mask flood last, so after the CESAs we just started diving from the mooring nearest the aquarium.  The site was as beautiful as before, though we were finning into the current now, which would dog us throughout the dive.  The aquarium turned awsome for Bobbi and I when a meter plus blacktip came at us from the left and crossed right in front of us, then disappeared in the rocks to our right.  We pointed madly and spiked our foreheads but I don't think my students saw it.

I led us west onto the reef, finding it by the audible clacking that greets us when we approach it.  It's aways interesing to come onto the reef, especially having just seen a shark, because anything can appear on this reef.  However, the reef has fallen on bad times after cyclone Gonu, and particularly after the cloak of red tide that afflicted it for half a year recenly.  It used to be pinkish raspberry coral but now it's a grey-brown mass of rubble with fish covering it nonetheless, but almost always cloaked in haze, and less often do we see interesting creatures here. Today was such a day, though right at the end of the dive, with Fares low on air (from having to go up and down with his and Véronique's CESAs at the beginning of the dive) and preparing his mask removal exercise, we drifted over a turtle.  We settled in a rubble patch to do that exercise, and then rejoined the turtle and found a dozen more of his friends resting nearby.

Fares and Véronique left the water at that point.  I accompanied them to the surface and saw the boat was near and that they were drifting that direction.  I was drifting too, so I descended quickly while I could still relocate Vince and Bobbi.  We revisited the coral patch where the turtles were hanging out, and then let ourselves be carried along the coral, where Bobbi and I again saw a shark cruising the sand, a 2 meter one this time, through he had moseyed off by the time Vince came over to see what we were pointing at.

That last dive was almost an hour for me, but we didn't reach ten meters. Though Dibba Rock reef is disappointing now compared with past glory, this was a nice dive, and it's always a pleasure to be diving with fun people and revisiting our favorite dive centers and seeing the kind faces of the young staff members there again.

Mergulho em Abrolhos 2: My dives 1000 and 1001, Aug 4, 2010

This continues my saga of arranging diving in Abrolhos from here:

http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2010/08/mergulho-em-abrolhos.html


The diving off Caravelas was to me, disappointing. As you've seen if you've visited the link above, I arrived there Saturday night, discovered there were no liveaboard dive trips going to Abrolhos that week, but I could come back Monday (closed Sunday) and get on a day trip to the islands Tuesday which was really for whale watching and snorkeling, but I could be assigned a dive guide (monitor) and be taken on one dive there.


But as it happened, the boat to Abrolhos on Tuesday broke down in one engine and turned back halfway to the islands. It at least got to an area where there were a lot of whales, and we spent an hour with them. But I returned to Caravelas at mid day still without having got wet with diving. The company that had to abort the trip (Horizonte Aberto) offered all its passengers to come back next day and return for free, and many did, and those staying at my pousada said the snorkeling at Abrolhos was great, good vis and lots of fish. But I had booked the diving the following day (and already paid an advance to book the boat) so I was given a complete refund. When I said that I was going to Parcel das Paredes the lady at Horizonte Aberto said, that's good! That's also a good dive site, you'll enjoy it.

So next day I was looking forward to it as I hoofed it down to the pier (everything is in walking distance in Caravelas, or jogging, as I most often got about if I needed to use the Internet or grab a bite). Rodrigo and Mauricio, a divemaster I'd met whom I was aware would be accompanying us, were loading the boat, which they called a tototo after the sound the engine makes as it chugs to its destination.

Rodrigo had said we were diving under the auspices of Apecatu, the dive center which had a house on the wharf where we had gone the day before for me to try on a wetsuit and BCD. They had taken 3 regulators from there and they were loading these and our tanks from the deck of a liveaboard, the Titan, onto the tototo tied alongside. There was a lot of gear lying about on the liveaboard and I asked if they were taking spares. As people who dive with me know, I always pack a spare dive bag with at least one extra kit. Even when training I take along a spare tank, and I have o-rings in my dive bag. Also, I pay regularly to have my regs serviced, but despite that they sometimes develop leaks, so it's always good to have a spare, and I try to see that I have at least one handy when diving.

So later I discovered there were problems with the equipment. The low pressure inflator connections had corroded on all the regs and were hard to clip into place, though Rodrigo was able to do it. When we started diving I discovered my depth gauge didn't work, so I had a look at Rodrigo's computer, 51 feet (our max depth that dive). Back on board when I asked for another reg I was told that none of the depth gauges worked on any of them and in any event they had brought no spares, so I had to do both dives without a depth gauge.  Rodrigo assured me we wouldn't go over 14 or 15 meters.

On that first dive, Rodrigo had an interesting rig, no BCD (he had rigged an air bladder around his waste for buoyancy control) and he had a harness to carry his tanks side-mounted. He explained the advantages, for diving in caves and wrecks for example, but on the first dive he carried two tanks, each with just 100 bar. This was strange, why not bring full tanks? 

This turned out to be doubly odd because for the last dive, the valve on Rodrigo's tank was faulty and spewed air when turned on, so we couldn't use that tank, and he had brought no others. Fortunately the first dive had been shallow and short and I had consumed just 70 bar, so my first tank still had 130. I noticed when he was testing the valve that his tank had just 150 bar anyway, so I suggested he use my first one, which is how we barely scrounged tanks for two dives.

We were diving in Parcel das Paredes, an area with chamaraos, or mushroom formations Rodrigo said were similar to those in Abrolhos. The boatman whom Rodrigo had hired, who was a very nice fellow, used no means of navigation that I could discern; that is, he had no compass, nor GPS. He steered seemingly by instinct, but one thing I noticed, when we arrived at the site, we still had land just visible on the horizon.

I took over steerage on the return trip because my companions were sleeping in the tiny cabin and the boatman was pulling in a fish on the line he'd trailed aft, and once I got the till, he just left me with it. The one time he took the till back was to get between the waves that marked the safe passage on the return to the river, so that had to be done in daylight for sure.

When I was steering on the return trip, the boatman indicated the direction through knowledge known only to him, so I put my compass on the top of the cabin and navigated according to that, which was between 320-330 degrees. I had noticed on the way out that the boatman had gone southerly and then easterly.The return compass heading gives me a fix on about where we were, more or less 150 degrees from the mouth of the river at Barra, and it took us about 3 hours to get out there going not many knots in the tototo, and a little over two hours to get back. The first and last hours were in the river and its brown water as it entered the sea.

The shoals we dived both had names the boatman knew. The first place was called Pedra de Leste, and the second Sequeiro do Sol. I got Mauricio to write that down for me/

I have been Googling the places we went, and I found this document
http://marte.dpi.inpe.br/col/dpi.inpe.br/sbsr@80/2008/11.17.21.38/doc/6595-6602.pdf
It has a map of Parcel das Paredes and Pedra de Leste is indicated as being in (or near) that chain, and Pedra de Leste is also mentioned as being in Parcel das Paredes in this document:
http://www.conservation.org.br/arquivos/MarineRAP38Bra.pdf
And finally, I found a map of the area at the bottom of this document:
http://www.ufsc.br/prolarus/abrolhos.html
and I hope they don't mind if I put it here, with credit to the makers of that site (and I'll take it down if they ask me to):

 

The two sites we dived were not far from one another, both essentially the same environment. The second dive was supposed to be on a wreck, but during the surface interval I was told the GPS had been dropped in water, so they wouldn't be able to find its location.

All of this could be taken in stride if the diving itself had been worth the trouble and expense, but it wasn't. There were lots of coral mushrooms, but the bottom was silt here. I stuck my hand in it to check it out and penetrated easily to my arm. The silt made the water milky, so vis was only 4 meters or so. There weren't many fish there, some angel fish, some parrots, some fusiliers, a couple of crawfish. Rodrigo pointed out the fire coral and brain coral and whip, or black coral. It was very poor diving, reminiscent of the breakwater at Abu Dhabi, on the inside, on a poor day. Each dive lasted about 40 minutes including the safety stop, and on each dive I exited the water with well over 100 bar in my tank.

In fairness I have to say I was not there in season.  Apparently in summer (winter in the northern hemisphere) water clarity there reaches 20 meters. Winter, the time I was there, was the season of whales, and there were plenty of those about. As we were about to motor back to port, I noticed spouts on the horizon and got the captain to turn the boat around and go to where the whales were playing. In the small boat we got much closer than we had the day before. There were lots of whales at play but we approached three arching out of the water in unison. They were on the move so by spotting them surfacing more than once we could anticipate where they would come up next and point the boat in that direction. They came up together like three roller coasters cresting and then sinking back gradually into the sea, and then they changed direction and came toward us. But we didn't know that until they re-emerged all together just off out bow, heading our way. That was impressive, and I just managed to get the picture at the head of this post before my camera malfunctioned (I'd just changed the batteries, but they were bad apparently). Anyway, I'll never forget the site of those three whale backs, like glistening elephants, rising together out of the water, arching, and with loud huffing, rolling back under the waves. But they must not have liked our boat because the next time we saw them they were heading away from us.

My trials continued the next morning when I got up to catch the one direct bus at 6:20 from Caravelas to Porto Seguro. Gao had said it stopped right on the road right outside the pousada.  But when it didn't come by 6:30 I asked some passersby what had become of it.  They said, not today, tomorrow.  Huh?  I walked the kilometer into town with my pack and checked at the bus station and there found the words on the schedule Secunda e Seixta.  And that's how I acquired the names for those two days of the week.  Seixta was the next day, Friday.

The next bus out of town was not until 10:00 so I went back to the pousada and rested and then returned to town around 9:00 to use the Internet.  At the station I could get a ticket only to Teixa da Freitas, the nearest transport hub on BR-101.  I already knew, having checked at the station a few days back, that I would not be able to catch the noon bus to Pto Seguro from there (I'd just miss it) and the one after was not until 5 p.m.  So I was anticipating a day just hanging out in bus stations, with an after-dark arrival in Pto Seguro.


On the bus to Teixa da Freitas I read my lonely planet more carefully.  I saw under "Getting there and away" that there were frequent buses to Eunapolis, an hour west of Pto Seguro on the BR-101, so when I arrived in Teixa da Freitas and asked for a bus to Pto Seguro and was told not for 5 hours, I then requested a ticket to Eunapolis, on a bus leaving in only an hour.  If you ask for a ticket to Pto Seguro, they don't offer you the obvious time-saving option.


The day got even better when I reached Eunaopolis and from the bus saw road signs for Arraial d'Adjuda and Troncoso.  I was thinking to go to Troncoso from Pto Seguro the following day anyway, but in Eunapolis it occurred to me that maybe I could go directly there and sleep there.  Checking Lonely Planet I found it had a central square called the Quadrado that was magic when seen at night, and also there were cheap pousadas right on the Quadrado.  


So on the spur of the moment I got the bus from Eunapolis at 6:00 and arrived at 8:00 to find a busy center square lively and brightly lit.  I asked the way to Quadrado and arrived there shortly, was ushered to a peaceful pousada on the Quadrado with wifi, and to make a long story short, it was magic just like the Lonely Planet said, and now I'm writing this over prolonged breakfast, view of the sea from the garden breakfast area, much happier than I would be in hectic Pro Seguro.  Which is where I need to head today, via the coast road and the people ferry across the river into town.

Mergulho em Abrolhos

I came to Brazil as part of what we call FLNW, not much to do with diving, but for what it's worth, http://braz2010vance.pbworks.com/

Long ago I met a guy online whose name is Felix.  He was one of the first participants in a community of teachers and students called Webheads, http://prosites-vstevens.homestead.com/files/efi/efwbahia.htm.  I almost visited him last century, the year I almost missed Christmas with my family in Houston because I was stuck in Caracas due to incessant rains that cut the road from the city to the airport.  I didn't visit Felix that year due to the expense of going south from Venezuela but I always wished that I had.

So this year, going to Brazil for the BrazTESOL conference and FLNW, I decided to pay a visit to Felix since in 1998 he had been one of my first stops in the future of learning in a networked world.  So I booked a flight from Sao Paulo to Porto Seguro, near where Felix lives.

The day before I was due to fly I caught Felix on Skype and he told me his uncle had just been killed in a car accident and he had to rush there.  He was unable to meet me in Porto Seguro as planned.

However, these days, when you buy a ticket online, you use it or lose it, so I flew to Porto Seguro as planned and after two nights, even with a visit to Arraial d'Ajudos, I was bored and decided to move south to Caravelas, opposite the Abrolhos Islands.

The Abrolhos have humpback whales this time of year and reputably Brazil's best or second best diving, depending on where you get your information.

However, if you don't speak Portuguese you are at a disadvantage if traveling on your own in Brazil. People there resemble Americans (the USA ones, I know, we're all Americans, north and south ... ) in that most speak only one language, and only a few speak a little Spanish.  If you speak Spanish you can accomplish a lot in Brazil in the way of eating, sleeping, and getting around, since the languages are similar, but if you want to arrange diving, which I quickly discovered was mergulho in Portuguese, well, you can see that the languages start to diverge at that point (buscar in Spanish).

In Porto Seguro I looked for any kind of travel agent where anyone spoke English, stopped in at hotels (that's where I learned it was mergulho) but I couldn't find anyone who could advise me about diving in Abrolhos.  My hotel had wireless access so of course while passing time there (while the neighbors were out partying, the quiet time of night, but they returned at 4:30; OUCH, radios, yelling) I got online and managed to send an email to a company called Sanuk Abrolhos via their website.  They responded with a pricelist in Portuguese, I ran it through Google translator, and I replied that yeah I'd like to do that, if I come down Saturday can I get on a trip Sunday?

That was Thursday, no reply Friday, and having exhausted all other avenues I decided Porto Seguro wasn't meeting expectations, I'll just go to Caravelas.  So I went to the bus station Friday and worked out the route  (no other way to get the info but go to the station) and Saturday, won't bore you with details, I wound up in Caravelas at sundown.

Here I found a relaxed but pretty, shall I say normal, or backwater (not sure how to describe it, suffice it to say that everything closes early in Caravelas) town with a main road and a small quarter of streets surrounding a small cathedral, all parked on a river that empties into the sea 10 km downriver at Barra.  I had a Lonely Planet Guide that listed two pousadas in Caravelas and a hotel in Barra for over 100 riais a night.  Commentary on one pousada was that it was nice but  out of town and "there are a lot of mosquitos."  So guess which one I chose (the one in town).

Getting off the bus I asked some people if they could direct me to the Pousada Canto do Adoba.  A couple of locals indicated the direction, one said it was a kilometer and I should take a taxi, I had a backpack so I said I'd walk, and to my surprise he showed me his car and said he would drive me there.  That was my welcome in Bahia, pretty much what I would find as I stayed on. Friendly Bahian people.

At the pousada they had plenty of rooms, I was the only guest.  The lady who ran the place, Gao, struggled to communicate with me but she gave up easily and resorted to the phone, where she called a friend who spoke French. My requests were twofold, diving and wifi.  As I would find out, neither were really available in Caravelas.

However the lady in French directed me to contact Fatima, who worked at a dive center and spoke English. Fatima didn't answer at first because she was at the supermarket.  However when Gao located her, she said they might be making  a two day trip to Abrolhos on Tuesday, she would check.  Later she called back to say that it would be a one day trip, which was mainly for whale watching, but they would be taking people try-diving, and I could join them.  It would be expensive about 400 Riais ($250) for the 4 hour trip out, two hours on the island, an hour diving (just one dive, beginners you know, shallow, splash splash) and then 4 hours back on the boat.  On the upside, we'd likely see whales.

She told me if I was interested I could stop by Monday and pay.  They were closed on Sunday. Sunday was looking to be a slow day in Caravelas.

No wireless but Gao had a computer in her office where the old old dog slept underneath.  Would I mind the dog? she asked.  If not, I could use the computer.  There I found a reply from Rodrigo who had been directed by Sanuk Abrolhos to get in touch with me and see what the heck I was on about in my foreign tongue.

I replied to Rodrigo, telling him I had just arrived in Caravelas, and next morning when I again checked internet after breakfast his reply to me came while I was at the computer. He said there were no Abrolhos trips that week but we could go to a nice dive site halfway.  I dashed back a reply that I'd be up for it that day or Monday and since he had given his number I would call him.

Meanwhile I was motioned to come to the kitchen. There was a guy there named Renaldo, same as the soccer player he pointed out, who spoke some English, and Gao wanted him to help me.  He said he didn't know much about diving but as to my second request, to find wifi, I might check at the hotel in Barra and he was going there, and i could ride with him.

So I called Rodrigo and told him I would be going to Barra and could we hook up later, and he told me he was in Barra at an Internet cafe.  I called Renaldo over, and Renaldo learned over the phone from Rodrigo where to take me to meet Rodrigo.

Rodrigo was a young PADI instructor born in Rio but living in Brasilia, but his girlfriend Luciana, who was there at the Internet cafe, had tempted him to come down to Caravelas and check out the lifestyle there.  So he was on a three month trial teaching diving, which he'd learned in Florida.  This long story I got later down on the beach over several beers and fish and farofa. Luciana was of Italian ancestry born in Curitiba.  She was living in Caravelas traveling 100 km a day on her motorcycle teaching in 4 jobs, which she loved because the people there were so appreciative.  I can relate to that! That's why I'm in Brazil and Argentina right now.  So Rodrigo was living mostly with Luciana in a house in this small town near the beach in Barra, both of them diving at every opportunity (she's a divemaster), and trying to decide if he should make this his life's calling. Duh!!

Let's hope he makes the right decision.  Meanwhile I'm trying to get on a diving trip. Rodrigo was working on a boat for Monday but meanwhile his company was supposed to maybe run out to Abrohlos Tuesday and pick up some people there and bring them back so it would be a three day dive trip for me. Sounds heavenly, expensive probably, but nevermind.  And that's the way we left it on the beach at Barra.

Rodrigo drove me to Caravelas to check if any of the three Internet cafes there were open.  None were so we returned to Barra where I hung out in the Internet Cafe there where I had met him and Luciana earlier and I caught the bus back to Caravelas.  I rode past my pousada into the city center, such as it was, thinking to get a bottle of wine at the supermarket and take it to a restaurant. Wine is problematic at restaurants in this region.  Red wine is kept in the fridge and you are offered sec or suave.  One is dry, one is sweet, and both are cold and crap if you are expecting a nice room temperature red wine with your meal (and both are 13 riais a liter in the supermarket here). But guess what, Sunday evening, sundown, the supermarket in Caravelas was closed, as was the Comidas self serve I'd eaten at the night before.  All dark and shuttered on a Sunday in Caravelas.

However, driving out of Caravelas earlier that day on our search for Internet Rodrigo and I had passed a bar with nobody there where the band was warming up on the open air platform outside.  This bar just opposite the BR petrol station in the center of town was in full swing when the bus pulled up at sundown when I returned to Caravelas.  There's nothing else to do there so I checked it out.  A big beer 600 ml was just 3.50 riais, $2.  Hey what else you gonna do on a Sunday night in Caravelas, Brazil?  I sat myself down among 100 other revelers.

The music was magic. I don't know what else to say about it.  Also all the town freaks were there.  There was a noticeable gay crowd, most you wouldn't notice except for the occasional grab for the crotch, cause they were dancing with ladies (not grabbing at their crotches ;-) Well one senuous sensuous guy slim with long hair and moving with the music, facial expressions beckoning (moi?) was obvious.  The blacks did their own thing with handshakes, one got me to fill his glass, but another came along and refilled it, helping each other. Also there was a dwarf.  It was a Fellini film, with samba.  Bahia.

When the band petered out, after people walked out of the crowd and sang (competently) I went across the street and ordered a chicken dinner for a lot of money 30 reais.  I found out why. It was a meal for three people.  I ate it anyway.  This was open air and the air was filled with music.  I paid the bill and walked back into the street.  The party, the same queers and blacks, and others recognizable, had moved around the corner, where another impromptu band was playing.  I figured they were impromptu because they were passing instruments around and I could see how one was mentoring another percussionist, trying to emulate the former's riffs.  Difficult.  This was cool stuff. Street music.  People recognized me, spoke to me in Portuguese, one in English.  Where do you stay here? I'm always evasive about that question.  Eventually I returned there.

Rodrigo called when I was in the shower.  They knocked at my door so I got out quickly and came to the phone in receptao.  The 3 day Abrohlos trip was not confirmed he said.  He would try for another intermediate trip for Tuesday.

Hmmm .. next day, Monday, was looking to be a slow day in Caravelas.

But hey, this is traveling. I like it!

Next day, no word from Rodrigo so I went for a jog.  I jogged to all the mergulho shops I had seen on my way up and down the one road in and out of Caravelas.  It was true, no one was diving that week.  Next week (smile, they were serious! friendly, what kind of dive resort is this??).  Anyway I ended up at Horizonte Aberto where all roads led, and to the place where I could at least go on a boat and get in the water next day at the Abrolhos Islands.  I sent word to Rodrigo that maybe he could set something up for Wednesday?  And then I jogged to LAN house and stuck a wire in my laptop (no wireless, remember?) and now I'm posting this.

By end of that day I had success.  I met Rodrigo in the road on my way back to the pousada to call him.  He had found a boat for the next day, but we could use it Wednesday as well so I decided to go with Horizonte Aberto on Tuesday (whale watching and try dive, except they would give me my own 'monitor' so it was sounding better than a splash) and Rodrigo on Wednesday.  I dropped by HA and paid for the trip, and gave Rodrigo an advance.

Next day was the big day.  I was actually finally going on a dive trip.  Only one dive to be sure, but they had me try on gear, they brought it to the boat, I met my 'monitor' who spoke no English, but we had common hand signals.  The boat filled with tourists there for whale watching and looking forward to snorkeling in Abrohlos.  We were told we could eat sandwiches and drink coffee as we liked and we headed out the river and into the open sea.  Within an hour we saw whales, lots of them.  Some came near the boat.  Some poked their heads out of the water, or rolled and waved huge fins in the air, or dived and showed us their flukes.  Water spouts dotted the horizon.  Occasionally one would leap from the water, they knew how to put on a show.

Meanwhile, disturbing alarm sounds were coming from the instrument console, then part of a carburetor appeared on deck, then we were told we'd be turning around and heading back, one engine out of commission.  We were back in port by noon, instead of at 5 or 6 as anticipated, and no diving, no Abrolhos Islands.

There were many GOOD things about the trip.  The whales were amazing and there were dozens of them.  We had a pleasant morning out and spent about the right amount of time on that activity.  I came back full of fruit and sandwich.  I reported immediately to the HA offices in town, just ten minutes walking from the wharf, wondering how much refund I would be able to manage, and they apologized and were sorry I still didn't make it diving there, how unusual, how unfortunate, and without argument simply refunded me all my money. Now, that was fair to a fault. A free trip whale watching goes a long way toward tempering disappointment!

Plus I get to spend the afternoon in an Internet cafe reporting on the situation.  I'm supposed to meet Rodrigo at 4:30 to try on my dive gear for tomorrow.  Rodrigo has one last chance to convince me that there IS diving in Caravelas.  He's reading my blog and wishes this were not the case so far.  I said it would be different if I could go on Portuguese websites and book diving in advance, and then I wouldn't just fall from the sky as it were during a week when there was not diving in Abrohlos.  He said normally I should just be able to fall from the sky, normally there is diving, but on the other hand, he agrees that the situation could be improved, and there's a problem here that a diving instructor should fall into Caravelas and after 4 days not be able to go on even one dive.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm enjoying myself, very relaxed here.  Gao's Pousada is filling up partly due to the word of mouth from the customers who are spreading the word.  It's already full of over 200 cats and dogs which she rescues from the neighborhood and keeps on the premises.  It's a very comfortable place, and she no longer gives up on my Portuguese (smile).

Continued with the tale of my 1000th and 1001st dives, here:
http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2010/08/mergulho-em-abrolhos-2-my-dives-1000.html