Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

First day of diving here. I ran through air really quickly. I got about half of the bottom time of the other divers. It may just be that my body needs to breathe more to support itself than other people's (too much weight training and not enough cardio?). Or it may be that I'm still not at ease with diving. It's also possible that the the Diamox I took yesterday is still affecting me. The drug increases the amount of carbon dioxide in the blood, which causes you to breathe faster.

Apart from having to come up so soon, the diving was good. After Monterey, the water felt really warm even wearing only a quarter of the neoprene. There were lots of fish, but none of the seaweed, and the visibility was amazing.

The real highlights of the dive trip were not actually the dives, though. As we were leaving the harbor, we saw pods of spinner dolphins frolicking around the boats. There were a couple of dolphin pups swimming near their mothers. Very cute.

And between dives we saw some pilot whales. The boat stopped and dropped us off in their path to snorkel. We got to swim alongside (and over) them for a while before they left us behind. They were amazingly big and quite fast, so they outpaced us quickly, but swimming with them for a few minutes was great. The ocean out there was an intense royal blue that went on forever. The beams of sunlight breaking the surface seemed to form rays pointing down to infinity. (Gina's Pictures)

Finding a dinner place that would handle our whole group and our various dietary restrictions was a challenge. We ended up at a place called Lu Lu's. Avoid it.