Addendum
It’s been pointed out that in all the excitement over hypothermia, I forgot to tell you all what I was throwing up over. No pretty blonde women this time, but just rather a lot of fish.
After the Great White Sharks in Cape Town, it seemed about time to get a little closer to them. But there are plenty of sharks out there; how to pick the best ones? Well, in the American way, we went for the biggest fish on Earth; Whale Sharks.*
They’re one of those filter-feeder types with the big mouths which suck up plankton and, by a mechanism inadequately explained by the guide, somehow ingest it, but not people. As they don’t have big teeth, you get slung into the water with a snorkel to swim alongside them.
They’re not hard to spot, especially when you hit a crowd of 30+ of the buggers. They swim right on the surface, to get all the plankton, and your main aims whilst in the water are (a) to get close, (b) not to get so close you end up in the mouth and (c) not to get hit by the tail. Some people also go for (d) to take a semi-decent picture of it.
We couldn’t move for them in the water, and they go slow enough for you to be able to keep pace for quite a long way. Here’s my favourite picture of the dive, there are more, including gob, in the Photos section:
So that was day one. What else? Well, me and L took our Advanced Open Water course, which involved going very deep. Deep enough for turtles, in fact (yeah, they’re higher up too, but the deep ones are big, like coffee tables), which are very thick and don’t notice you floating next to them. The temptation to grab onto them is so great I fear I might have done, had the book not drawn me a picture specifically forbidding it.
Aside from that, we saw seahorses (which will wrap their tails around a little finger if you stroke their bellies) and moray eels and squirrelfish, which are minging, and scorpionfish and trunkfish and pufferfish and bats. The bats were in caves in the fresh water dives, not under the sea.
Cancun, Mexico - Saf
* Yeah, I thought it was Basking Sharks too, but Wikipedia agrees with the tour guides.
Location, North America | saf | 
June 25, 2009 5:10 pm
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