July 14, 2011

Today I went diving!

I did a boat trip with Desert Sea Divers. We left their dock at about 8:15 AM after turning my passport over to them - which made me a bit nervous, but I had to assume they were professionals. We had 3 full boats going out to do 3 dives for a total of 8 hours on the water. I was on boat 4 with Divemaster Mark from Columbus, Ohio. While setting up my gear I got to chatting with some of the people on the boat. I have discovered the best way to meet westerners out here is to go diving. Since you cannot get a tourist visa to Saudi Arabia, these dive operations book tours and act as the Arabian sponsor to get people in on visitor visas. I didn't realize how "privileged" I am to have the ability to come here. Anyway, the girl next to me is originally from LA but she's living in Riyadh and works as an analyst at the US Embassy. She was with another guy from Utah who does finance for the Embassy. The 3 of us plus a guy from the UK become a dive team with me as the leader since I am a PADI Divemaster.

Our first dive was the Cable Wreck which was a cargo ship named Staphonos carrying a payload of steel cable and beams that hit a shallow reef out in the middle of the ocean and dumped her load everywhere - hence the name. Mark informed up that one of the other boats was tied up to a line that was attached to the bow of the wreck so we could descend down the line, swim towards the stern, then back to the bow and ascend. By the time we were geared up, our boat had turned and he said that he were probably just about right over the stern so we might as well just drop right down. Well, by the time my group was in the water, we had been carried pretty far off by the current. Then as we tried to descend, Mac (the finance guy) had to go back up. His full mustache was making it impossible for his mask to create a seal on his face so it kept flooding. He decided to head back to the boat. Now we had been just bobbing around in the water for quite some time. Did I mention we were sitting in about 6 foot swells coming from every direction as they bounced off the reefs? By now, we were probably 100 yards form the dive boat. I decided we should descend and then head in the right direction. We headed down, found another group and started following them. Soon, I saw a large dark shape in the distance, I figured it was the wreck. We swam for a while and nothing more materialized. I knew the wreck was in about 60 feet of water so I checked my dive computer and to my surprise it said I was at 96 feet! I immediately grabbed the other 2 divers and we ascended to 60 feet and continued on. Eventually, the dark shape came into focus - it was the open ocean. We had hit the edge of a drop-off and were staring into deep blue nothingness that went on forever. At that point, I decided I would surface and take a look around. Trying to communicate that to my buddies underwater was quite entertaining for them I'm sure. I ascended and sure enough, we were still quite far from the boat, but at least I had a heading. I went back down and we continued. Finally, we were tired, didn't know where were were so we all went up, located the boat and began swimming towards it. After about 15 minutes of kicking and not getting anywhere, the boat spotted us and came to pick us up. Once we were aboard, they had to keep circling around picking up other random divers that had gotten caught in the current and taken way off course. So, no, we didn't see the wreck.

We had some stray divers on our boat, and our Divemaster, Mark, ended up on another boat so we headed to a protected, shallow reef, tied the boats together, did a diver swap and then motored to the next reef, Ana's Reef. This was a nice, shallow reef in protected waters so it was super calm and relatively clear. We jumped in, Mac even got down for a bit and followed us around until he had to surface and become a snorkeller. We saw some big beautiful corals and a nice variety of fish, including a moray eel and a black and white snapper that I am still working on identifying (not sure if it is a juvenile form of something of if that's what it looks like all it's life) but they are pretty rare to see, so that was cool.

After this dive we had a nice lunch of salad and rice with chicken and veggies. We stayed anchored here for about another hour so we starting taking flying leaps off the boat and snorkeling around. At about 2:00 we left for our last dive at South Tower Reef. This was a great site, shallow and well protected with some incredible coral and fish life. We saw 2 blue spotted rays, lots of pipefish, a cute little baby Volitans lionfish and some massive nudibranchs (sea slugs).

We hit the dock at exactly 5:00 which was pretty good considering most stuff around here doesn't operate on any kind of schedule. My new friends from the Embassy even gave me a ride back to the Palace. When I got home, I rinsed my gear, stuffed my face and then passed out cold while watching Invictus on TV.

Good day!