Dive Photos

Here I am all stoked for my first dive in Brazil. A dive shop was offering a special 3 dives for 200 reais, so I decided now was the time to test out that new BCD I got for Christmas and familiarize myself with Brazilian life below the surface. First I went to the yacht club in town to meet up with the rest of the scuba divers. You can see the views from the yacht club below:

The Yacht Club is about a 20 or 30 minute bus ride up the coast, and you can see JP from the shore of the club.

Here is the trusty dive boat that I would call home for the entire day. We were supposed to meet at the Yacht Club at 11 AM, a little late in my mind if we were going to get three dives in, but hey it's Brazil, they do everything on a slower schedule here. So with this in mind, I put my feet up in the shade and enjoyed my surroundings.

Well now notice this blog is called Dive Photos. It's an ironic title, because of course things didn't go quite as planned. First, our 11 AM departure was delayed by 90 minutes, why we didn't leave on time remains unclear to me, let's just call it a lazy Brazil departure. Then after about 30 minutes, the boat engine had some problems, so we had to stop and wait another 30 minutes for the captain to tinker with the engine to "get 'er kickin' again." The first dive was a deep dive, down to 135+ feet. Unfortunately it took us about 3 hours to get to a location off the shore of Joao Pessoa where the ocean was that deep. Now the seas were calm, so seasickness wasn't an issue, but still, did you see the boat? It doesn't exactly say a comfortable three hour ride, it more says Gilligan's Island "3 hour tour!" Well we finally got out there to do our deep dive, and because it was so deep, (for those non-scuba people, deep dives = little time underwater due to safety issues) we only spent about 10 minutes looking around down there at some sponges and a small number of fish. So the first dive was disappointing. And here's what we saw when we came up from the first dive.

Ah, yes. The beautiful sunset. Oh but wait. Weren't we supposed to do three dives? Ah yes, well it turns out we only did two. Our second dive was a night dive on a shipwreck. The wreck was kind of cool in that it had HEAPS of fish and by heaps I mean more than the 5 we saw at 135 feet. There were 3 giant sleeping turtles on the wreck though and those were amazing to see. I'm pretty sure I've never seen this species before, and I"m fairly sure they were loggerheads. They were ginormous, the largest turtles I've ever seen and they had an unusually large head in comparison to their body. Regardless it made the long day, and disappointing first dive worth it, to see the big turtles. All in all one of the better night dives I"ve done, but a semi-disappoing first day of diving in Brazil. For those people trying to choose between a destination in the Pacific and Brazil, I'd choose a Pacific destination hands down any day. The best diving in Brazil is supposed to be at this far away island chain called Fernando do Noronha. I'm hoping to get there sometime during my time here to increase my opinion of diving in Brazil.