Dive #179 - Rich Torkington's Dive Log

This small turtle swam around us plenty.
Photograph by Rob in Belize 2004

Dive Journal: Rob jumps on the Cool Dive and Ricky and Bo take us on a longer-than-usual boat ride northeast across the interior of the atoll. The boat then veers through an opening in the mangroves and does a series of smooth banks gliding through a curvy passageway. Rob takes video from the bow of the boat – I’m supposing he’s going to speed it up later for a neat effect.

The boat stops outside the wall at a site called the Zoo. As we’re doing our backrolls, a group of dolphins shows up and Linda starts getting real excited. As we submerge, Bo points away from the wall over the sand flats, and we can see the dolphins racing by in and out of our range of view. Cool.

The site at the Zoo is a wall with a wide patch of reef on its top. This patch is full of grooves and channels perpendicular to the wall. Rob and Bo suggest we widely spread out across the patch and slowly swim with the current to cover the most area. If you couldn’t guess, the site is called the Zoo for the variety of large and small critters often seen here.

One of the first we see is another beautiful spotted eagle ray soaring along the wall. Just stunning. We then come upon a nice little turtle who is definitely familiar with divers. Bo and Linda both caress the turtle and scratch its shell a little bit, and the turtle simply swims in circles around and through us, with no effort to get away from us. Rob is shooting video and stills the whole time and gets some good shots.

As we continue down the wall, I find myself on the outer edge. From the distant haze, I see two spotted eagle rays soaring in formation headed directly for me. I admire them for some seconds as they approach, then look over to see if the rest of team sees them. No one. I lightly wave to the closest diver (Greg, 50 feet away) but he doesn’t see me. The rays continue their approach – I’m getting pretty excited now.

Wanting to share the experience, I turn in the direction of Greg and make a couple exaggerated arm motions so that maybe he’ll see it out of his peripheral vision. Nope. But as I turn back to the rays, I discover that they have seen me, and have decided to make a sharp turn away from me. Sigh, learned a lesson there – need to be very passive with spotted eagle rays.

Everyone enjoyed this one – a nice long relaxed afternoon dive.