I must be mad. Plymouth to London, overnight stop. London to Newark (upon which a flight attendant asked: "excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, is there a physician on board?") on to Houston.
Arrive Houston 02:00 CDT (08:00 BST), finally collect temporary lost luggage by 03:00, find that the mono-rail isn't working, walk to hotel, collapse for 5 hours. Houston to Belize, arrive at the dock for Wave Dancer at 14:30 (BST-7).
The Wave Dancer is a big boat. Just over 40m I think - but some people still insist on measuring in feet.. I haven't done that many sums in my head since leaving school! We were also told to finish a dive with at least 500psi in the tanks. It took me 3 days to find out that that equates to about 35bar, which is a little less than I'm used to, and couldn't break the habit of surfacing on 50bar... which is no bad thing.
So having checked in upon boarding, we were shown our room, had a little briefing on safety, and were left alone to set up our dive gear. Nitrox was available (for free) and was a consistent 28-29% mix... ok for free, but I'd want more O2 if I had to pay for it.
The crew were excellent, 4 of them were divers. 1 of which was the on board photo pro, who was also a PADI instructor, there was another instructor, plus the 2 captains (who may or may not have been instructors), either way, they were evidently very experienced divers.
The food was superb, with a capital 'S'. I can be a fussy eater on liveaboards, but
I managed to eat nearly everything. There's also plenty to do on board. A large
selection of books. TV/VCR in each room, with a selection of videos. Free drinks.
A desalination plant that was so good, it made bottled water unnecessary. Plus many
other things I'm sure... I didn't get to do any of these things... photographers are
cursed with their equipment. My typical day:-
Get up, have breakfast, 1st dive.
Sort out camera, 2nd dive
Sort out camera, lunch, finish off camera, 3rd dive
Sort out camera, 4th dive
Sort out camera, catch up with log book, dinner, night dive
Sort out camera, shower, collapse in bed
Of course, it wasn't mandatory to do 5 dives per day, or to take the camera on all of
them, but the time you leave the camera behind, along comes a shark or a ray or a
nudibranch. Such is the burden we are forced to bear. :-)
The diving was nice and relaxed, I think we only encountered one current the whole time we were there. Overall, I would say that the Southern Egyptian Red Sea is better, but the diving is still good. I particularly liked the big tubes sponges, and tube corals.
It started slow, but towards the end of the week I was finding quite a number of Flamingo Tongue's, which I think are nudibranchs. Either way, they're real pretty, and I must have taken about 50 photos of them. Of course, only a handful are decent.
Other highlights were nurse sharks (although they just sleep all the time), and a wacky thing which in my book is a Web Burrfish. It has the weirdest eye I've seen on anything. It's like one of those green holograms that you find in a breakfast cereal box.
A pretty hyped dive spot this one. It's a sunken cave system that from the air looks like a large dark blue circle amongst the turquoise of the shallower reefs. This was strange, because it was the only guided dive that we had. The plan was to go to 39m (130ft) look at the stalactites, and ascend 9 minutes after leaving the surface.
People react to this site differently. I enjoyed it, but was expecting more from it. The stalactites are huge though. Some as wide a 1.5m (4-5ft) and 5-6m (15-20ft) tall. They were fairly awesome.
I guess the best bit was doing my deep stop and taking photos of 20 odd divers above me in the sun drenched blue.
Our penultimate day in Belize consisted of 2 dives. We were woken at 05:30 by a polite knock on the door. Struggled out of bed and into the wetsuits, don the gear, to hell with the camera, and fall into the water at 05:59. I woke up at that point. Only 5 of us made it for the dawn dive, to see the reef wake up. In reality it was us that was waking up and the reef was basically awake already, although we did see more yellowhead jarfishes than on any other dive.
The second dive was at 09:00, and we were back in Belize City just about lunchtime. We opted to do an excursion to the Belize Zoo, which seemed to be a slightly cooler option than a trip to some ancient ruins. 4 of us met up with another 4 from the Aggressor, and off we went. The Zoo was tastefully done, and is more of a sanctuary for unwanted pets. Quite who would keep a Jaguar or a Crocodile as a pet, was a little beyond me.
Well, we'd managed to spend all our US dollars, and 30 minutes before the airport pickup realised that we needed $15 each to get out of the country. I spent a very hot 20 minutes finding a Barclays Bank (stroke of luck I thought) before it rejected my Barclays debit card.
Flight out was delayed due to mechanical problems, so we landed in Houston about 30 minutes after our connection back to London had taken off. So we had an overnight in an even hotter Houston, before shipping out the next day.
Strange thing... the bloke next to me on the flight claimed to do Houston to London every month... yet he spent the whole 8 hours seemingly very tense and tapping his foot to the music. Maybe he just didn't want any sleep.
Just after we left Houston, the cabin staff started looking out the window of one of the exit doors, called more staff over, more peering out and whispering, with lots of worried looks on their faces. Shortly afterwards the darn captain turns up and has a look for himself. At that point, he told them it was nothing to worry about, and was supposed to do that, or something... I didn't hear properly as I was looking for a parachute. Flash backs to Arthur Dent: "So this is it, we're going to die." I think I calmed down by about Ohio.
We did the whole trip through Dive Quest who were fairly good. The flights were really tight though, but maybe they were the only ones that we could have taken.
The Wave Dancer crew met expectations and the boat is excellent. My first
"luxury" liveaboard, and
probably won't be my last. Those people we spoke to on the Aggressor said
that they were pampered just as much (to be expected).