Happily for me today I find myself scuba diving in sunny Cozumel Mexico. Last year Rebecca and I to our first vacation ever (Cayo Coco Cuba) and a yearly trip to the sun has become a tradition. Nice! Before the trip last year I took scuba lessons as I was worried that I would be bored sitting on the beach. I am not sure that I would have been bored at all but I sure am happy to have taken up scuba diving! Today was dive number 70 and I truly love it. The diving was the reason we chose to come here. I guess to be honest I chose as Rebecca doesn’t dive. She does like to snorkel and loves the quantity of fish here. Cozumel has some of the best, most easily accessible reef diving in the world and it is just a short plane ride from our home in Toronto. Perfect!
Before this trip I had a grand total of 2 salt water dives under my belt. I have to say the diving here is much different than diving in Canada. In my short diving career I have embraced diving Canada’s cold waters. After the Cuba trip last year I immediately bought a dry suit so that I would have the ability to “dive where I live”. It just made sense to me. I have met too many divers who live in Canada and only dive on their once or twice yearly vacations. That makes no sense to me. If you love something wouldn’t you want to do it as often as possible? I would and do.
Last weekend we were diving Humber Bay just west of downtown Toronto. It was 34 degrees fahrenheit and there was pretty much nothing to look at but a bunch of concrete blocks. Somehow we had fun and I enjoyed the dive. Today it was 79 degrees F and so far on my trip I have seen huge sea turtles, nurse sharks, massive lobsters and crabs, sea dragons, rays and many, many more colorful fish than I could ever hope to learn the names of. The reefs are teeming with life and color and we drift along on the current and fly through these foreign landscapes. It really is spectacular!
At home we look at perfectly preserved wrecks of ships from the last couple hundred years or as I like to say “broken rusty machines underwater”. Here is is nature at its best. Both are amazing and what I find even more amazing still is the contrast. If I didn’t dive at home I probably wouldn’t appreciate this quite so much and vice versa. I certainly wouldn’t be as experienced of a diver as I wouldn’t have nearly the dives that I do. I make a point of telling my dive buddies on the boats here what the temperature was of my last dive back home and you should hear them erupt. They simply can not believe it. I can’t imagine not doing it this way.
More Pictures HERE.
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