Trip report May 3 - 10 Blue XT Sea & El Cantil with photos
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Trip report May 3 - 10 Blue XT Sea & El Cantil with photos
Took our first trip to Coz May 3 – 10. It was great! We will definitely go back!
Diving – Dove with Blue XT Sea. Took the advice of Christi’s fans and they are right. This is a really good op. Only 4 -6 on the boat each day. 12 day and 1 night dives averaged 63 minutes. They took our equipment each night and had it already setup each day when they picked us up at the dock. And even when they changed DM’s not only did they still know how much weight we dived with the day before they even knew how much was in the front pockets and how much went in the rear trim pockets. And they even had 1lb weights, first dive op I’ve used that had anything smaller than 2lb. DM’s and captains were really helpful getting equipment on and off, offered us lots of cold water before and after dives, and were fun to be around. SI’s were at the beach with cold water, two kinds of juice, three kind of fresh fruit and a cake like snack. DM’s were Blanca, Juan, Arturo and Pedro. All were good at finding critters. I highly recommend this op!
Lodging – Stayed at El Cantil. These are great condos, very roomy and the furnishings were as good as or better than the web photos. This time of year it was very quiet, only one or two couples at the manmade beach in the afternoons, always easy to get a lounge chair under the palapa. And it was real convenient to have Chedraui right behind it. The only problem we had is two days before we arrive we get an email letting us know construction will be going on at the pools. The three small pools will be closed but the big pool open, and from their email “It will be quiet, except for some noise May 2 and 3”. Well it turned out that May 4 -9 the workers were there from 7AM to after 7:30 PM every day and almost the whole time a tile saw and/or concrete grinder was running. It sure took the charm off sitting on our balcony with a glass of wine to watch the sunset. I didn’t care about the pools closed and I could have even accepted the need to do maintenance if they just stopped at 5 or even 6PM, but going till it got dark each night didn’t seem too guest friendly.
Restaurants – Our favorite restaurant was Kinta. Nice setting, great food and service. Saw Christi there getting a salad to go. I understand why it is a favorite of hers. If Kinta was in LA with that good of food and those prices it would be a huge hit. Other ones we liked were: La Choza, Pancho's Backyard, Camilos, Guidos, Rock N Java, Palmera's, and Sorissi for gelato.
Diverrex,
We dove with XT Sea the week after you. Really liked diving with Auturo and Blanca. Our pics just posted by Budaman. Yours are great! What setup do you use?
You are all too kind about my photos. I took over 600 photos on this trip and I must have 550 that prove I know nothing about UW photography. I have a Canon A620 in the Canon housing with the Inon 2000 strobe. I used manual settings the whole trip but believe I mostly left it on f5.6 and 1/125. I do adjust the manual output of the strobe constantly. I shoot, look at the replay (I don’t bother with the histogram) and then adjust the strobe output, sometimes multiple adjustments for the same subject. Lighting varied greatly on this trip, one dive I turned the strobe off for much of the dive since there was so much light, other times, particularly under overhangs, I had it almost to full power. One day the currents were real strong, poor visibility (for Coz) with lots of stuff in the water, and it was very overcast so I was using almost full power on the strobe. Most of my photos that day look like it was snowing underwater from all the backscatter. Most days even when the viz varied from 50 to 80 feet, the three feet of water in front of me was so clear I was very pleased with the lack of backscatter. My favorite photo is the Flamingos Tongues. I knew I wanted to get close so I switched to Macro mode.
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