Feliz Navidad!

So, today marked the first day of my divemaster internship. Overall, it was a great and busy first day.

But before I talk about that, let me back track to the past two weeks.

A little over two weeks ago marked the end of the first half of my internship. Or, marked the internship portion that I originally came to Mexico to complete. It was a sad day for all, but I think I can say that all of us were ready to leave PG. We were the last phase, but I think a good phase to end with. We collected a fair amount of coral, fish, birding, and seagrass data. Not to mention a few less lionfish in the Caribbean and incidental sightings data on marine mammals, rays, and turtles!

My two week break started with a trip to xcalak, where we took a private dive boat to San Pedro, Belize! San Pedro turned out to be a sketchy place, but I had the best pizza yet while I've been gone, so I guess it was worth it.

The next day we took a boat to Caye Caulker where we stayed for three nights. One of the days we dove the Blue Hole, along with two other dives. The blue hole was incredible! 42m down. And we saw a reef shark. So breathtaking. I felt like I was In the little mermaid.

The last day we took a sailboat down the coast of Belize. I think the captain said we traveled 3/4 of the reef. During the trip we fished, snorkeled, and enjoyed the free punch. We stayed in really two really small islands where you could walk around in 5 and 10 minutes.

The trip ended in Placencia, which was a really cute and less touristy place in Belize. Do to complications with the sailing company we had to take the buses back to Playa del Carmen, Mexico. I don't think you know how far that is, but let me just say it was a 24 hour long, tiring journey. Not to mention we went through Belize city, which was pretty sketchy.

When we made it up to Playa, we pretty much hung around for a week. But it was still great, and just what I wanted. I did end up doing two Cozumel dives, and also two more cenote dives! One of which I went to 100ft. So cool, but kind of creepy because of how dark it is and the halocline.

So that was my two week break, very fun and consisted of fun dives. :)

First day of DMT was tiring, but really cool. It's awesome to be on the other side of things. We did our first dive, and it wasn't as plentiful on the reef like I'd expected, but it was still really cool. We saw two turtles, and three barracudas. One of which was huge!!

Anyway, the next few months are going to be tiring, but they'll also be an incredible experience.

Let's go!

Mahajual

So, after much drama over placements for our internship, I finally can happily
say that I'll be in majahual for the next three months! I'll be interning with
four of my really good friends and couldn't be more excited for the next chapter
in my life. Which reminds me! If anyone would like to send me a care package, I
would love it!!

In other news, we have less than two weeks left in punta
gruesa and it's a little bitter sweet. We found out last week that GVI Punta
Gruesa will no longer be after this phase. It's pretty much because, although my
phase is one of the biggest yet, not many people are signing up for GVI Mexico.
It sucks a lot. They're thinking about making a program in Belize, but I'm sure
that program will be twice as much as in Mexico. We're all trying to make the
most of the next few weeks.

After PG, im planning on traveling to Belize and diving the Blue Hole, then going to Guatemala and hopefully skydiving! After that I'm going to go back to Playa del Carmen and hang out. :)Last night was the night when staff cooks and we requested a Thanksgiving dinner. Pretty funny considering there is a really small amount of Americans on base. The dinner was a little different from real Thanksgiving, but it was still delicious! It was 3 hours late, just like normal Thanksgiving dinner though. Haha. Well this marks probably the last update until I leave PG. Hope you all are doing great!

PS. I was walking in the shallows yesterday, and some how managed to get stung by a jellyfish. I didnt see it, but it must have been huge because it´s tentacle wrapped around my calf. Pretty gnarly!

March

So, it´s been awhile since I´ve updated you all. I´m not really sure what the last thing I wrote about was, but here is what I´ve been up to recently.

We had our four day weekend last weekend and it was probably the best weekend yet! We got to leave early on Thursday, due to bad conditions on the water, but it worked out to our benefit. We spent our first night in Tulum, which was a blast. I´m hoping to go back soon, because Tulum is supposed to have one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. We all stayed in a cute little hostel that made us breakfast in the morning, and then went off to go dive the cenotes. For those of you who don´t know what a cenote is, well it´s basically a cavern. We did two cavern dives, and they were INCREDIBLE. So much fun. The last dive we did was called the temple of doom, and to enter we had to walk a little ways in the jungle and then jump 10 feet down into a hole of water. It was so much fun. What made this dive the best though, was going through a halocline. It was a little freaky, because you can´t really see anything do to the mixing of salt and fresh water, but it was still a really cool experience.

After the dives, we made our way to Playa del Carmen and hung out there for a night. Playa is a growing city, that is estimated to one day be as big as Cancun. Playa is definitely one of my favorite places, full of good food and entertainment.

The next day we took a ferry to Cozumel. We didn´t dive, unfortunately, but one day I´ll be back to dive it. Its supposed to be one of the best dives in the world. Cozumel is a cute little island, but it´s ridiculously touristy. It´s unfortunate that the Caribbean islands have to be like that. It seems like every second someone was haggling me for my money. :/

After Cozumel, we made our way back to Playa, and then back to the grind of base camp. I dove 5 times this week, and it feels great to finally be back in the diving routine. The reef out here is incredible, and it seems like every dive I do, I see something better and better. One of the dives this week, I got to watch one of the staff members kill a lionfish. That was awesome! We even did a lionfish dissection. You all know I loved that. :)

In more exciting news, dun dun dunnnnn, I´m staying in Mexico for another 3 months! I´ll be working in a dive shop to get my Dive Masters. Yup, that´s right. You won´t see me until March. I can´t believe this is happening, but I couldn´t be more excited! It´s such a great opportunity that I couldn´t let pass me by for anything. I´ll either be in Mahajual (the closest town to me now) Cozumel, or another city I can´t spell at all (sounds like ish-ka-lack).

Seems like my life couldn´t get any better :)

Hurricane Rina and much more

You all are probably confused on why I´m updating on a Thursday. Well, let me break it down for you. Last night we all stayed in a hotel in one of the little towns waiting for the storm to pass. Before we arrived in Casitas, we packed all of our belongings into the dive shop, put the boats on shore, borded up anything that could fly away, etc. The waves passed the lagoon were enormous, but so gorgeous. After we arrived in town, we settled in our hotel rooms, ate, and pretty much chilled the rest of the evening. The hurricane is currently downgraded back to category 1 and is now just a tropical storm. Sounds scary but basically all that I have noticed was a lot of wind, some rain (although it apparently rained heavily early in the morning) and an increase in humidity. Not exactly what I was imagining for a hurricane but I´m happy this is all we got. We´re leaving for Punta Gruesa in a couple hours, where we have to unpack everything that we did yesterday. Bust. But oh well, it was good to leave for a little bit and have a REAL bed and a hot shower. We´re going to have a full day tomorrow and half day on saturday, so hopefully I´ll be able to talk to some of you saturday afternoon/sunday. We´re trying to see if we can do something for the Day of the Dead. I don´t really know what they do here for it, but either way I want to be apart of it.


Other then the random hurricane warning and evacuation, life on base has been good. Still enjoying myself to the fullest. Although, October 24 made for the best day of my life. I dove first wave with 3 other volunteers and one of the staff members. And as we were going through our PI (point intercept invertebrate species list) IDing different organisms we heard sonar. And then the boat moving around above us. We knew that dolphins were near us. We all were looking around in circles, but the visibility wasn´t too good so it was hard to see where they were. Finally, the lighting was just right and I saw my first wild dolphin. Even better was the fact that I was scuba diving while seeing it. I saw two more while we were down there, and we basically cut the dive short with what we were doing and were looking for dolphins. It was mezmerizing watching them. I started screaming underwater and even got a little teary eyed in my mask. It was so surreal. After we surfaced, we quickly took off our scuba gear and put our snorkels in. We met up with the other boat, who were already in the water waiting for the dolphins. The two boats were circling all of us, creating a wake that the dolphins like to play in. We waited for about 10 minutes and finally the dolphins came back to us. They were really active and playful with us. It was so much fun just swimming with them. There were six of them that hung out with us, but apparently there were 10 others hanging around the boat. We saw bottlenose and spotted dolphins. It was incredible, and I still can´t believe it happened!

Life on the Yucatan

I have officially completed my third week of my internship. Not too much to update yet, we basically do the same thing everyday. But everyday is always a good day on the Yucatan Peninsula! We dive everyday, sometimes twice a day if you're lucky. One wave even got to see 18 dolphins ! So far I've seen 11 barracuda, two turtles, huge lobsters, shrimp, and numerous species of fish and coral. It's an incredible feeling seeing these amazing organisms in their natural environment. It's even more amazing being in this environment with people who love it just as much as you do.

This is going to be super short, seeing how I really don't have much to update you all on. Basically, this is the life.

Scuba Deb

I can´t believe it´s only been a little over a week since I have left. In that span of time, I completed my Open Water Certification and last friday I finished my Advanced Open Water Certification. And we are also close to finishing our Emergency First Responder Course as well!

I don´t even know where to begin to explain how my life has been in Puenta Gruesa. Here is my best attempt at explaining this amazing adventure I´m having.

There are 9 staff and 26 volunteers on base, from 12 different countries. Mostly England and Australia. Everyone´s accents are starting to blend a little bit together, and it´s been pretty funny listening to the different pronounciations of words and different usages of words. I´m 1 of 3 American volunteers, and the only one representating the Pacific Northwest! Woo! The people are absolutely wonderful. I can´t believe I get to spend so much time with such like-minded free spirits.

Every morning we get up around 6 o´clock and start our "duties". This varies with what group you are in, but it´s either boat duty, communal (cleaning the palapa, the toilets, etc), grounds (raking the sand so sand flies can´t multiply!), or kitchen duty. Kitchen duty is by far the hardest, considering you are cooking a meal for 35 people using really basic ingredients. The food has been pretty good so far, but as you can imagine, sometimes the portions are a little smaller than you´d like.

We´ve had a thunderstorm pretty much everyday. But the rain is refreshing and really reminds me of home. I´ve already taken two rain showers and had my two military showers. Did I mention we shower once every four days? Since we dive pretty much everyday, and have copious amounts of sunscreen/BUG REPELLANT on, I´m sure you´re realizing what kind of state were all in. But it´s okay, we´re all in it together and loving it.

After duties, we have breakfast and then kit up (get ready to dive). There are normally three waves (2 groups of divers at a time) which normally take about 5 hours. Since I completed my Advanced Open water, we´ve been busy doing our skills. The dives that we did are Peak Performance Buoyancy, Naturalist, Navigation, and finally the Deep water dive. That was probably my favorite, then the Navigation. For the deep water dive, we were under for about 16 minutes and were at 96 feet. We saw numerous lion fish (which are invasive!) and a barracuda. We also played a bunch of games underwater, and even brought an egg down and had some fun with that. Diving has been awesome. And with every dive I´m seeing my skills improve and am feeling more and more comfortable in the water.

After diving, we either work the compressor, the radio, or have been studying for our fish and coral ID tests. I´m on the coral team, and have about 50 scientific names I need to have memorized relatively soon. Bleh. After all of that, we have dinner, have a debrief and usually go chill out on the beach if the weather is good. This last week it´s been really windy and stormy, so it´s been really refreshing to go out and have a beer on the beach with everyone.

We did a beach clean up on friday, and found a disgusting amount of debris on the beach. You wouldn´t believe the amount of garbage that´s floating around in the Caribbean. We have a half day on friday and have a full day off on saturday. Most likely you guys will get an update from me on saturdays. On base, we have no internet, no phones, and are 45 minutes away from town. We basically live in the boonies and are surrounded by mangroves aka breeding grounds for thousands of mosquitos. All of the volunteers and staff have a ridiculous amount of bites on our bodies from numerous types of bugs. It sucks, and there suuuper itchy. Probably the only thing I dislike about this trip. I´m even almost all out of the bugspray I brought from home!

Well, that´s just a summation of my trip so far. There are so many more details to give, but not enough time. Basically all you need to know is I´m having a great time and you´ll hear from me on saturdays!

Oh! and I forgot to say, thanks for the birthday wishes! My program started on my birthday and although it was definitely a different kind of birthday, it was great. After dinner, the staff turned out the lights and brought out a cake and everyone sang happy birthday to me. Definitely one of the best birthdays yet.

A here we go!

I arrived in Playa del Carmen around 6 o´clock yesterday evening. After two flights, a bus ride, and a two hour time difference, I was exhausted. I checked into my hostel, which is actually quite nice. The couple that owns it are really sweet and they even have a cat! After doing some SCUBA review, and taking two cold showers, I decided to go to sleep.

This morning when I woke up it was the perfect temperature. Not too hot, and definitely not cold. The sun was shining and I new it was going to be a great day! I had a light breakfast in the foyer, did some more review, and chilled out. Today I completed my first saltwater dive. And my second. It was incredible. I was nervous at first, but gradually felt more and more comfortable as time went on. The reef is gorgeous. The fish are gorgeous. The coral are gorgeous. Everything was beautiful. And I can´t believe I´m here right now. The conditions were great to dive in, too. The water was warm (I was in a shortee!), mild to no waves, and a small current. I couldn´t have asked for a better first (and second) dive! Although, I did have a minor encounter with some firal coral. BUT, I did get to see a four foot Eagle ray. That was definitely the highlight of my dive.

After I got back, I met with another GVI intern and we explored and got some dinner. Not the best dinner, probably the blandest Mexican food out there. But oh well, I was hungry. We met a couple more people on the trip as well, things are really beginning to feel real!

No pictures yet, but hopefully soon! Tomorrow is my last dive for my cert and then we leave on friday! aka my birthday. I won´t have internet, till who knows when. But hopefully next weekend I´ll have another blog about my crazy adventures!!