The Great Lion Hunt
So today was a big day of diving… ok so we’re talking yesterday at this point as I am a day behind but what can you do… The captain got a hold of my drink mug and somehow kept filling it when I wasn’t looking.. which of course meant by the time Ashley and I got done with the Book of Questions for the night, I was too .. yeah… tired… we’ll go with that.. to sit down and write anything. So off to nodingham I went.
Yesterday… to hijack the Beatles tune.. all my troubles went so FAR away. Diving is definitely my happy place. Even when I’m the guy in the boat who sucks his air down the fastest it still couldn’t dampen my spirits. As you’ll see from the pics and videos that follow, the dives were filled with fantastic soft and hard coral formations, wonderful macro and pelagic sea life and most importantly great new dive friends. A huge shout out to Barb (spider monkey) and Blaine, and Jeff and Leo (pop pop) who were so warm and welcoming to their little dive group. They had been diving together for three days before I showed up and didn’t hesitate to let me in and joke and laugh with them not only on the boat but at dinner and happy hour and at after dinner bar time.
So why the “Lion Hunt”? Well Blaine had a bit of an obsession with eradicating the population of Lionfish from the local waters. It is considered completely acceptable as they are a particularly aggressive and invasive species not native to the Caribbean waters and have no natural predators. So while I don’t have a problem with this practice, the dives sometimes become more of a quest to kill Lionfish rather than simply enjoying a killer dive.. but to be fair we always enjoyed the dives and the Lionfish hunt never got in the way of my enjoyment of the dive.
Well loyal readers, I think I’ll choose to keep this one short as a) I’m tired and b) I think the pics and videos speak for themselves. More tomorrow on my trip from Belize Dive Haven on Turneffe Atol to Hamanasi Dive and Adventure Resort in Hopkins. Spoiler alert, there is an AWESOME cave tour that happened along the way.
