Costa Rica Day 3-- SCUBA Diving!

Today was our SCUBA diving day... one of the points of us even taking this trip to Costa Rica. From our trip planning research, we decided that diving in Playa Hermosa (near Playa del Coco) would be best.

We left the hotel at 6am so that we could make it to the dive shop on time at 8am. It wasn't supposed to be 2 hours away, but the speed limits are so stinkin' slow there that it kinda takes forever to get around. It was a good thing we gave ourselves that much time because we turned too soon and ended up taking the long way to Playa Hermosa on a dirt road, complete with a bunch of Costa Rican vaqueros herding the hugest line of cattle across the road.

Seriously, it was like watching a long line of train cars crossing!

Anyway, we got to the dive shop (Diving Safaris) and all geared up and out to the boat. The dive shop is owned by a family from Colorado who moved down here about 12 years ago to raise their daughters... an interesting little set up. It was ok, but not as friendly as I expected. I'm not experienced enough to know if I'd recommend this shop, but I put the link up there in case you want to compare with other companies in the area.

Our boat ride was about a half hour or so...
which gave us plenty of touristy picture taking time!

We did 2 dives off the coast of Playa Hermosa.The first one was at Argentina Point. I had some troubles getting suited up... I actually rubbed the skin right off my knuckles before I realized that I had rubbed them raw.

That stupid wetsuit was the hardest wetsuit I've ever put on!
And the Pacific Ocean is super salty there, so I literally had salt in my wounds.
Awesome.
(Here I am after my first dive trying to de-salt my mouth)

Anyway, then our divemaster, Mauricio, wasn't the friendliest character and didn't speak a ton of English. When I told him I was a new diver and have problems equalizing, he said that I should go down first. But I got about 6 feet under and freaked out because I had no one in front of me and the visibility was bad. So I came up and apologized and told him I was scared since I'm still really new at this. So instead, we went down last together. I guess he was friendly enough, but nothing like my hero instructor Gary.

I did fine on the first dive. See look! I look like a natural! ;)

And the veteran divers, Becca...

...and Burke.

We saw a white tip reef shark hiding out in the reef... that was cool!

And we saw tons of blowfish, schools of different kinds of fish, eel,

(weird looking creatures...)

a seahorse (which apparently is pretty rare!)

and even a few sting rays!

The sting rays were in REALLY cold water (like the temperature dropped 30 degrees instantly) so we didn't stay there long. I think it was a good dive... we were down for about a half hour and got to about 50ft.

Here's a slideshow of everything else we saw (or at least got a good picture of). I'm not an expert marine biologist, so you'll just have to guess at what you're looking at... or use my handy-dandy captions of what I think these creatures are!

Between dives you have to rest for about an hour to allow the nitrogen from our oxygen tanks to escape our blood. So we just chilled...

(Becca & Burke warming up in the sunlight on the boat deck)

...we chatted with other divers...

...and ate some yummy galletas de mantequilla (butter cookies).

Mmmmm....

The second dive was at a site called Monkey Head because the island/rock looks just like a Monkey's head...

...go figure.

On our way down, we saw a bunch of jelly fish!

I really enjoyed this dive a lot better. There seemed to be better visibility and the schools of fish I saw were just amazing. But see this bright yellow thing tied around my waist?

That's called a "weight belt" (read with sarcasm and air quote fingers...) And you really, really need that extra weight to sink down to where all the fishies are. Well, I was swimming along (with Becca kind of below me) and all of the sudden, I heard a clank and started floating up to the surface! My weight belt just totally slipped off. Becca realized what happened and tried to grab onto my fins to keep me down (it's dangerous to surface too quickly) but I was already out of her reach. So I did my best to surface slowly and then just inflated my BCD at the surface and waited for Mauricio to come find me. He finally came up and he sounded annoyed, like I had freaked out and ditched my weights on purpose (another no-no in diving). But I told him it just slipped off. So he cinched it back on me (super tight) and then took me back down. The second half of that dive wasn't nearly as good, so I was kinda sad that my weight belt incident had messed up the mo-jo I had going.

Anyway, the boat ride back to shore was kind of long. I got out of that yucky wetsuit and then went out on the platform of the boat to dry off and warm up, and well, I fell asleep! And of course my sunscreen from the morning had come off with the wetsuit. So I absolutely fried!!!

What a nice souvenir for me to get on DAY 3 of my adventure...

After getting back to shore and getting everything settled back at the shop, we were pretty dang hungry. So we found this sports bar and waited for like 45 minutes to eat pizza.

All the while, Burke did this:

Facebooked on his iPhone (free wi-fi at that bar). This, complete with tongue sticking out, and eyes glued to the TV were frequent sites for me and Becca...

Then we went back to the beach and got these traditional Costa Rican beach treats called granizado, It's a slush drink made of finely shaved ice and flavored syrup and served with evaporated/condensed milk on top.

It was pretty yummy and, of course, fun to have an authentic treat after spending the afternoon in a very American sports bar eating pizza...

Oh, so at this point, you may have realized that Caleb is missing from this post... it's because he's not SCUBA certified, so he stayed at the hotel all day to work on homework. Anyway, we (namely Becca) wanted to get back to him to watch the sunset.

And, so, we did.