Me and Annie hopped down to Cozumel for a long Columbus Day weekend to do some diving and lionfish hunting in Cozumel with Aldora Divers. Because it was such a short trip I didn’t bother bringing my rebreather. Back to single-tank open circuit for me I guess. 🙁 Even still that’s one of the primary reasons I like diving with Aldora. With access to steel HP120s and HP100s (+ nitrox) and an experienced group of divers you can get some LONG single tank dives in.
For 3 days of diving our runtimes were 91 minutes, 81 minutes, 102 minutes, 91 minutes, 66 minutes and 100 minutes. Our shortest dive was only because everyone ran out of NDLs. Everyone went into deco and we ran out of reef at a more shallow depth to hunt on. All in All, it was a pretty stellar albeit short trip. I must confess that Annie has finally beaten my SAC rate. We are now at about a 500-700psi (~48bar) discrepancy in her favor. Sadly all things must come to an end and I figured this would happen at some point. With that being said, I don’t mind being the weakness link in air consumption when that still means 100 minute dives on a single tank in water warm. Perhaps my rebreather has spoiled me with seemingly unlimited quantities of warm pre-mixed gas…
Because the weather and winds were good (in contrast to the destruction caused by Hurricane Matthew in Bahamas, Haiti, Cuba, etc) we used this opportunity to dive the less often dove east side of Cozumel. Rather than launching directly from the east side which Aldora sometimes does when strong Nortes close the port on the west side of the island we motored around the island passing Punta Sur and Maracaibo. A lot of people seem to be under the impression that Cozumel diving ends with Maracaibo with operators rarely venturing this far. That statement couldn’t be further from the truth as there are numerous unnamed (or alternatively, reefs called by different names) on the east side and far north (well past Barracuda) that simply don’t get visited very often.
We dove different sections of El Isolote, Mirador and some other reefs several times cleaning out different areas for lionfish that the fisherman cooperative in Cozumel had probably not visited. The east side is teaming with gardens of beautiful soft coral and large sea fans that you just simply don’t find in the main marine park area. It’s an altogether different diving experience than Cozumel’s most popular reef systems like Palancar and Colombia. I didn’t unfortunately take that many photos as I was busy hunting lionfish for most of the trip so this is not a very “fishy” album.
We ended up doing pretty well on most dives for lionfish usually filling the zookeeper. Sallye had her usual “SMB” of lionfish floating off her stringer. Of course no Cozumel trip is complete without fresh ceviche on the boat. We also ended up bringing some of them to La Perlita to cook and gave the rest away to captain/crew.
Finally we did see dolphins on 2 of the 3 days. We even had the opportunity to jump in water with them to snorkel. They stuck around for a few minutes until they were bored of us. Unfortunately I forgot to hit record on my camera so I didn’t get any great video.
Unfortunately all good things must come to an end especially for our short weekend jaunt to Cozumel. Back to work and of course cold water diving. 🙂
