terrydarc
Guest
Woohoo!
At last report our 60 year old newbie diver and his hotshot 25 year old son were about ready to venture off, in the face of tropical storm Chantal, to Central America in search of scuba BOW certs. Now the trip is over, the log book is filled out - sort of anyway.
Story continues moved from Central America Forum...
Cast of characters: Terry: aging programmer/father with April 2001 Discover Scuba in Roatan.
Chris: 25 years old son, also Discover Scuba 4 years ago in Oz.
Roger: 40'ish divemaster and all around fixit man for anything more techical than a broom at PBR.
Island Location: Plantation Beach Resort Cayos Cochinos, remote Honduran resort, strangely deserted when our characters arrive. Trees densly covering the islands looking a lot like broccoli with the odd palm tree spiked in here and there. Small coves on the west side of Cochino Grande and PBR taking one completely. White sand beaches and a pier reching out to accept the aging, but sturdy 35' V-8 diesel dive boat/transport, Wahoo III.
Plantation Beach Resort: Happily the PBR compressor is way, way up the hill along with the generator which runs the fans (no A/C) and 24 volt night lights and fans on the beds. Glad for those! Water system is also spring fed, but bottled to drink and cook with. Food uniformly excellent, but we did nearly run them out by staying another 4 days, pinning Roger and resupply down until we had sprite and Salva-vidas beer on tap to drink. Nice clean, screened wooden bungalows, two story with real hot water from gas heaters in the showers. Stone floors down below and bedrooms up the steep stairs.
Entertainment: Aside from diving an extensive, new video collection of maybe 500 movies plus 1st 8 episodes of the Sopranos. The bar open nightly or pour your own. Music system and CD's. Couple other people stopping off from their sailboats, but basically isolated. Honduran staff to practice your Spanish on. Paperback books to read - we brought out own.
Weather: Bright blue skies, fleecy white cloads the entire stay except two rain showers - once drenching us in a open boat, but what the heck? Chantal? What's that? 85 degrees in the day, 78-80 at night and HUMID. Sand flies ever present when the wind is less than 10 knots.
Water: 82 degrees (yeah!), mostly smooth and fair to good visibility - 40' to 100', depending on how you cared to measure it: seeing clearly or seeing dimly. Two dives in the morning and one in the afternoon. Morning dives are calmer and Roger changed the dive sites based on the chop which rose to 3 foot swells once. This made locating the boat kind of exciting coming up on one occasion. Warm ocean water is still a strange idea for someone raised on the west coast of the US.
Excursion dates: 8/22/01 through 9/1/01. After nearly not getting out of San Francico on Taca Air because of weather in San Francisco and NOT in Honduras, we limped in several hours late to La Ceiba on the coast, 22 miles from our final destination - totally bushed and wigged out. I asked the desk to call Plantation Beach to say we wanted to be picked up at the Hotel Gran Paris (recommeded) instead of the airport next morning for our boatride to PBR. Got to the room and our phone rang - this was Roger, divemaster in the room next door happy that he didn't need to go to the airport to find us. An omen...
Trip Out To Cayos: Next morning we chugged out in the Wahoo III to Cayo Grande where PBR is located 2 hours, 20 miles or so. PBR is grandfathered in, since the rest of the 15 or so little islands around are in a nature preserve. If you want to dive Cayos, you get PBR or bring your own dive boat as both the Agressor IV and Anthony's Key did during our stay. Roger remarked that if both AKR and Agressor IV were diving in the Cayos, that ought to tell you something.
Study Plan: We read PADI BOW modules 1-4 for two solid days, taking the brutally easy multi-guess tests. Yeech!!! Chris score 100% on all tests, dad misses two questions. We tool around snorkeling for a couple hours out front day two when it's too choppy to do the OW dives.
Parenthetical Remark: (must say the required 200m swim and 10 minute float were the hardest thing we did all week). Chris with his contact lenses didn't appreciate the repeated mask flooding/mask clearing bits, but into each life some rain must fall or salt water wash in... Finally we compress the 4 "confined water" dives into two and get into the OW diving - all off the Wahoo III. Nice sandy beach and jumping off the pier, wading in or sitting on the concrete platform just in front of the dive shop for the "confined" dives.
OW1 - 8/25: 44', 34 minutes at Hidden Valley Reef. The tired diver drag (rescue manuver) is the second hardest thing all week and it's repeated later. Nice dive, similar to Roatan that I recall from 4 months earlier.
OW2 - 8/26: 57', 38 minutes at Lion's Head (cabeza de leon). removing and replacing regulator, reg recovery, and all those fun little learning things that give you more and more confidence that being underwater is not that bad - fun actually.
OW3 - 8/26: 45', 33 minutes also at Lion's head after 25 minute surface interval. More excercises including compass navigation. No problems!
OW4 - 8/26: 44', 35 minutes, 30/30 Point. After a 3 hour lunch break we are done with the required dives. No more mask flooding which makes Chris happy. Nor does dad have to lug large son about in tired diver tow. Fun ahead!
On the rec portions of these dives we get to tool around with Roger and see fish, coral as well as the usual cast of characters. No divers except at a distance. Just us at PBR with the full attention of the divemaster. Sweet! Later that day we take the final written exam. Hotshot finally misses one question eliminating the perfect record and dad misses 3. We are C card cert'ed and stoked but I think not overconfident. More later including pictures (crossing my fingers).
Update on the photos - does not look promising. Pictures are wild mix of color, some over/underexposed, blurred, what in the world was I shooting there?, etc. Will try to salvage a few. Couple came out nice, but my goodness, I have a new appreciation of U/W photographers.
Terry
At last report our 60 year old newbie diver and his hotshot 25 year old son were about ready to venture off, in the face of tropical storm Chantal, to Central America in search of scuba BOW certs. Now the trip is over, the log book is filled out - sort of anyway.
Story continues moved from Central America Forum...
Cast of characters: Terry: aging programmer/father with April 2001 Discover Scuba in Roatan.
Chris: 25 years old son, also Discover Scuba 4 years ago in Oz.
Roger: 40'ish divemaster and all around fixit man for anything more techical than a broom at PBR.
Island Location: Plantation Beach Resort Cayos Cochinos, remote Honduran resort, strangely deserted when our characters arrive. Trees densly covering the islands looking a lot like broccoli with the odd palm tree spiked in here and there. Small coves on the west side of Cochino Grande and PBR taking one completely. White sand beaches and a pier reching out to accept the aging, but sturdy 35' V-8 diesel dive boat/transport, Wahoo III.
Plantation Beach Resort: Happily the PBR compressor is way, way up the hill along with the generator which runs the fans (no A/C) and 24 volt night lights and fans on the beds. Glad for those! Water system is also spring fed, but bottled to drink and cook with. Food uniformly excellent, but we did nearly run them out by staying another 4 days, pinning Roger and resupply down until we had sprite and Salva-vidas beer on tap to drink. Nice clean, screened wooden bungalows, two story with real hot water from gas heaters in the showers. Stone floors down below and bedrooms up the steep stairs.
Entertainment: Aside from diving an extensive, new video collection of maybe 500 movies plus 1st 8 episodes of the Sopranos. The bar open nightly or pour your own. Music system and CD's. Couple other people stopping off from their sailboats, but basically isolated. Honduran staff to practice your Spanish on. Paperback books to read - we brought out own.
Weather: Bright blue skies, fleecy white cloads the entire stay except two rain showers - once drenching us in a open boat, but what the heck? Chantal? What's that? 85 degrees in the day, 78-80 at night and HUMID. Sand flies ever present when the wind is less than 10 knots.
Water: 82 degrees (yeah!), mostly smooth and fair to good visibility - 40' to 100', depending on how you cared to measure it: seeing clearly or seeing dimly. Two dives in the morning and one in the afternoon. Morning dives are calmer and Roger changed the dive sites based on the chop which rose to 3 foot swells once. This made locating the boat kind of exciting coming up on one occasion. Warm ocean water is still a strange idea for someone raised on the west coast of the US.
Excursion dates: 8/22/01 through 9/1/01. After nearly not getting out of San Francico on Taca Air because of weather in San Francisco and NOT in Honduras, we limped in several hours late to La Ceiba on the coast, 22 miles from our final destination - totally bushed and wigged out. I asked the desk to call Plantation Beach to say we wanted to be picked up at the Hotel Gran Paris (recommeded) instead of the airport next morning for our boatride to PBR. Got to the room and our phone rang - this was Roger, divemaster in the room next door happy that he didn't need to go to the airport to find us. An omen...
Trip Out To Cayos: Next morning we chugged out in the Wahoo III to Cayo Grande where PBR is located 2 hours, 20 miles or so. PBR is grandfathered in, since the rest of the 15 or so little islands around are in a nature preserve. If you want to dive Cayos, you get PBR or bring your own dive boat as both the Agressor IV and Anthony's Key did during our stay. Roger remarked that if both AKR and Agressor IV were diving in the Cayos, that ought to tell you something.
Study Plan: We read PADI BOW modules 1-4 for two solid days, taking the brutally easy multi-guess tests. Yeech!!! Chris score 100% on all tests, dad misses two questions. We tool around snorkeling for a couple hours out front day two when it's too choppy to do the OW dives.
Parenthetical Remark: (must say the required 200m swim and 10 minute float were the hardest thing we did all week). Chris with his contact lenses didn't appreciate the repeated mask flooding/mask clearing bits, but into each life some rain must fall or salt water wash in... Finally we compress the 4 "confined water" dives into two and get into the OW diving - all off the Wahoo III. Nice sandy beach and jumping off the pier, wading in or sitting on the concrete platform just in front of the dive shop for the "confined" dives.
OW1 - 8/25: 44', 34 minutes at Hidden Valley Reef. The tired diver drag (rescue manuver) is the second hardest thing all week and it's repeated later. Nice dive, similar to Roatan that I recall from 4 months earlier.
OW2 - 8/26: 57', 38 minutes at Lion's Head (cabeza de leon). removing and replacing regulator, reg recovery, and all those fun little learning things that give you more and more confidence that being underwater is not that bad - fun actually.
OW3 - 8/26: 45', 33 minutes also at Lion's head after 25 minute surface interval. More excercises including compass navigation. No problems!
OW4 - 8/26: 44', 35 minutes, 30/30 Point. After a 3 hour lunch break we are done with the required dives. No more mask flooding which makes Chris happy. Nor does dad have to lug large son about in tired diver tow. Fun ahead!
On the rec portions of these dives we get to tool around with Roger and see fish, coral as well as the usual cast of characters. No divers except at a distance. Just us at PBR with the full attention of the divemaster. Sweet! Later that day we take the final written exam. Hotshot finally misses one question eliminating the perfect record and dad misses 3. We are C card cert'ed and stoked but I think not overconfident. More later including pictures (crossing my fingers).
Update on the photos - does not look promising. Pictures are wild mix of color, some over/underexposed, blurred, what in the world was I shooting there?, etc. Will try to salvage a few. Couple came out nice, but my goodness, I have a new appreciation of U/W photographers.
Terry
