Riding Rock - San Salvador Jun 09 trip report

[Puffer Fish]

Just got back from my first trip to Riding rock...got a package deal including air from Fort Lauderdale to San Salvador on the Spirit airline club med Charter Air Bus flight.

Getting thru the airport was a breeze - as Spirit is sort of famous for long lines...but the charter was walk up... Tag bags (allowed two bags with a maximum weight of 50 lbs each) and go to gate.

Roughtly one hour later and we landed a the San Salvador airport.. one long runway.. and a very small terminal:



With a driver waiting for us and our bags.. we made the short (about a mile) trip to Riding Rock...

The island is about 12 miles x 6 miles.. mostly swamps and brackish lakes.. with a couple of hills..and a road that goes around the outside of the island..

We were on the water...just south of club med...

This is the view from the main building looking south to the rooms:



My room was on the end closest, in the two story building, on the second floor.

I shared a room with another diver named Tom...

The room was nice, sort of what you would expect from a Best Western.. with two double beds...clean, with tile floors.

The marina, was down about an equal distance farther..



We dropped our gear, and went and had lunch...

[Puffer Fish]

No diving that first day (darn)... but we did get all the rules and got our gear setup..

The weather, by the way, was perfect... with only a very light breeze.

The water a lovely blue color and very flat...as it was when we left:

[Puffer Fish]

Ok, just to get this out of the way... there were a few issues:

1. I asked if I needed to bring yoke regulators and was told to not worry about it.. so I brought two din regulators...which they have no adaptors for...Club med had din tanks, but they only had one fill adaptor. We ended up putting all my stuff on one of their first stages (which I used the whole week and was not charged for...)

2. They use neutral aluminum 80 cf tanks.. it is all they have... these tanks were filled to between 3000 and 3200 psi... but they are only 77.4 cubic ft if filled to 3300. And they have lots of leaks.. and blown o-rings...

So one is actually diving with a tank that has around 70 -75 cubic ft of air. Diving here can be fairly deep, so if you use air fast.. this can make for short dives.

Thankfully, our boat only had two new divers, and they were women...and everyone else had excellent SAC rates.. If you have a SAC rate around .8.. this is not the place to go diving (unless they get some larger tanks). Mine is between .4 and .5 and to be honest, I was one of the highest in our group (of 14).

We were told that all dives were limited to 45 minutes, but on our boat, thankfully, it was not the case.. most times the dives were just under an hour. Not the case on the other boat.

[Puffer Fish]

In the first morning, we had our breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast, orange juice, various meats, pancakes and french toast (buffet style) that was to be repeated every day..they make great scrambled eggs there, by the way.

One hour after the start of breakfast we were to be at the boat to leave (breakfast usually took about 15 minutes.. the walk about 10..

And off we went.. we had two divers that needed checkout dives, so we went to a shallow place and did our first dive:

Here is our diver after having completed a very successful checkout with our instructor:



Notice the leaking valve on Debby's tank.. that was common.

[Puffer Fish]

All the boat diving there is pretty much the same...tie off, drop down to a sandy area, with small coral heads and swim west till you get to reef covered with algae and then drop over a wall. Sometimes there is a swim thru... sometimes structure to the wall, but it always involves a wall.

Our second dive was over such a wall... lovely dive. Here we see a couple of divers at the bottom of this wall (not all are this "shallow").. at something over 100 ft.

One of our divers here managed to get a 14 minute deco stop out of this dive:



After that, it was back for lunch (the tanks are filled on the boat)... then out for the afternoon dive (one only)..

Then back for dinner...drinks if you want them... sleep and repeat.

[Puffer Fish]

The next morning, the wind had started to blow from the west... we still went out, but getting on and off the boat was a major event. By the afternoon, several people did not go out due to sea sickness or worries about being injured.

Underwater all was nice on all three dives.

[Puffer Fish]

A word about lionfish.. they are everywhere...at first you take pictures of them.. then you just ignore them...and every so often, someone would encounter one in the wrong place... one of our divers decided to swim thru a large crack and ran right into a very large one:



And while I have hundreds of pictures of them... will spare anyone reading this with but a few:

[Puffer Fish]

So, the morning of day three.. and we now had this:



And no diving.. but.. wait.. while they really don't have shore diving... you can do it on the other side of the island...as it was the same on day four.. we did two different areas (both very similar)...

Ok, not for everyone... figure you will be doing at least a 3/4 mile total swim...but what an interesting area.. grass beds, with coral lumps sticking out.. and all sorts of strange things.

Here is what it looked like in general:



And the farther out you went, the bigger the coral was.... and eventually you had swim thrus...and lots of life..

[Puffer Fish]

And Lobsters.. huge, giant lobster.. some of the biggest I have ever seen...the smallest was larger than the biggest I have seen in florida...

Notice I took this picture looking up at the lobster:





That last one was over 2 ft long.. well over a foot high..

But there was other stuff:



That fire worm was also huge..seems things here are way big or way small (arrow head crabs are all small here)

These fish change color...one color on top and one when down in the grass:





This guy posed for me:

[Puffer Fish]

Two dives, each over an hour.. not bad for the bad weather, sadly only a few did both.

The afternoon on day four was spent on a tour of the island.. the lighthouse is neat.. built in the 1880's.. it still uses the original equipment:



You can climb to the top and see the original working lamps and controls...







Then off to see the, well it sort of speaks for itself: