Hi All, Yesterday started off like most of the others… breakfast, driving and diving. I was ‘bringing up the rear’ on today’s two dives and had my hands full with one diver in particular. The diver kept me busy enough keeping him safe, for the majority of both of the dives, my camera hung below me on it’s tether while I dealt with this diver. Kind of bummed out at the end of the first dive, I resigned myself to the fact that the second dive was probably not going to be any better. I was not wrong….. almost~~~ Once we got everybody back to the boat, that particular diver went on up and got on the boat. I still had half a tank left- so I started swimming around getting some people pictures and anything that I could find that was photo worthy. I finally got down to around 700 lbs of air and decided to go on up and do my safety stop (safety stop is a 3 to 5 minute stop made between 15 and 20 feet) during the final ascent of a dive ). Divers should be back on the boat with no less than 500 lbs in their tank [for multiple reasons] Normally during my safety stop, is when I fold in the lights in on my camera, hook up the carrying lanyard, put on the lens cover and detach the camera from the tether….. and that’s exactly what I did. As I started my slow ascent to the surface there was a small school of fish I had been watching (and photographing) and it had a big ole Barracuda watching them. About 4′ from the surface I saw this large dark shadow on the other side of the school of fish and it only took me a split second to realize what I was seeing…. A Manta Ray~! It took me even less time to yank the lens cover off of my camera and head back down towards it~! I “had” to get at least one decent shot of it before it was gone. Imagine my my surprise when it turned and came at me~!!! Even bigger grin when it started doing barrel rolls around me. For a solid two minutes we swam in unison as I took pictures, then video, back to pictures, more video and yet back to pictures. The Dive Master, said “It looked like you two were dancing”. Would have been great to had a video of that~!! When the Ray finally tired of playing with us went on her way— I realized I had followed her a long way and now had no friggin’ idea where the boat was at. Thankfully the Dive Master did and away we went. I was breathing hard from dancing with the Ray… Thankfully she stayed fairly shallow so I did not need to do another safety stop. I was a juuust a little lower on air than what I should have been. 😉 But OH SO Worth it~! Swimming with one of those gorgeous creatures is an item on my Life List that I can now happily check off~! A few more details tomorrow maybe… over my limit now.
Good Night Ya’ll – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Thankx for stopping in~!
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