feb. 9 — shark dive reloaded

Ben has been talking all week about going back to Playa Del Carmen to do another shark dive. He’d been working diligently to convince people that we need to put some food in the water to increase the number of sharks we’d see. I’m not in favour of doing this and would have preferred that we not do so. I’m not particularly scared of feeding them (though I would not want to hand feed them as Ben claims they do in Australia). I’m more concerned about affecting their natural behavior. I debated with myself for a while but decided I would go despite my ethical objections. I did make sure that Ben knew my thoughts on the matter. Ben figured if we dropped some food over the site that we would see more sharks.

In the end, I don’t think Ben and a friend of his successfully chummed the water. They tried to lower a bucket full of sardines (they wanted Tuna but did not find any before we left). The bucket had holes in it so that sharks would smell it. The problem was that the bucket was actually a jug and while it might have descended to the right depth, the captain moved the boat a couple of times and I suspect the jug broke under the stress and drifted off.

Unfortunately on the back roll entry, someone rolled late and ended up hitting another diver in the head with their tank. This opened up a wound on the poor guy’s head and he decided diving with sharks while bleeding was not a good idea.

From there on, the dive was much like the dive last week. We saw two bull sharks. This time I was the one closest to a shark passing by and swam out to it while banging my tank to get everyone’s attention. I got within about 20ft and got a couple of half decent pictures. This shark was about 5ft long, maybe 6ft.

For our second dive, we headed to Tortugas, a site renown for the number of turtles that feed on the grasses at the site. We saw a lot of turtles and I got some good pictures and even a little video. I remembered to adjust my exposure settings today and I got much better pictures than last week. Near the end of the dive one brave turtle swam into our group near the surface to check us out. Very nice.

While hovering near the bottom checking out one turtle, I accidentally ran my left hand over some fire coral. I knew instantly what I had done as the back of my hand suddenly became fiercely itchy. It was not quite painful, but irritating. The treatment for fire coral stings is to change the PH of the skin at the site. My hand was not feeling too bad when we surfaced, and I didn’t really feel like peeing on it in front of everyone (we didn’t have anything else appropriate on the boat), so I just left it.

Combined, the two dives left me more nitrogen saturated than I had been before. The shark dive took me to 102ft and we stayed pretty close to our computer limits on the ascent. We spent about 40 minutes on the surface and then dove to 70ft on Tortugas. We should have stayed around 55ft to avoid excessive nitrogen exposure, but there were lots of turtles to go visit and we all had computers and were within their safety limits.

Complicating things, I had not got a lot of sleep the last couple of nights and had been pretty active the last couple of days and was perhaps not as hydrated as I could have been. All these things argue to be more conservative with dive profiles. A couple hours after the Tortugas dive, I started imagining I might be experiencing signs of decompression sickness (the bends). I was tired and got a bit light headed for a few minutes. I was fine a couple of hours later and I suspect I was just tired and got dehydrated during the dives, but it was a good lesson to dive more conservatively in such a situation in the future.

One of the problems faced by dive professionals is that they dive frequently, more so than recreational divers. Therefore, you are more likely to be diving with some residual elevated nitrogen levels than divers who have not been diving as much. If you are diving with customers, you want to give them a nice long dive, but you must also watch out for your own safety. In the above situation, Sarah and I were on a fun dive (though a couple of MAD customers were with us) and had dove more recently than the other divers. Added conservatism on our part was warranted. I don’t mean to suggest that we were diving recklessly, we were within our no-decompression limits, but we were stretching them, and more-so than the other divers. I’d like to think that I won’t be pushing it so close in the future.

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