January 11, 2007 -- Wolf Island

Last night we headed back to Wolf Island. It was a bit of a choppie ride, as we were heading against the current. Luckily it was only a 2 hr ride back. We had achored off just after 11pm, so when you sat out on the deck, all you saw were millions of stars in the sky.

Today they have 4 dives planned. 2 morning dives, and 2 afternoon dives. I decided to opt out of the second afternoon dive, as it was in a location we had gone to 4 times already and I really wasn´t feeling all good from the 4 dives yesterday.

Dive 1

Dive Site: Landslide
Max Depth: 100ft
Max Time: 60 minutes
Temp: 78

Details: So this is the 3rd dive in the same location, my expectations were pretty low, as I didn´t know what else to expect different, other than the strength of the current. This dive ended up being 40 minutes, max depth 75ft, visibility 50-60ft. Surprisingly this dive turned out to be a wonderful dive. Current remained strong and at times you could feel the upflows of cold water that REALLY woke you up. This time around saw many blacktip sharks and hammerheads, that really hasn´t changed much. But with the cold upflows, the sharks were not afraid to come closer than normal. At one point I spotted mark just playing in some bolders.. go figure... when i got to him, i found out the reason... he found DINNER!!! LOBSTER!!! but unfortunately the little guy was uncooperative and refused to come out and play, I even tried to take a picture of him and all i got was his feeler sticking out from inside the bolder. Guess we´ll be eating whatever the chef makes us today for dinner. I did get more pictures today, but we found out that the other group did find a whale shark, they said it was a baby only about 10-15ft in length.. YIKES!!! at first we didn´t believe them, but then we saw the picture... PRETTY KEWL!!!!

Dive 2

Dive Site: Landslide
Max Depth: 100ft
Max Time: 60 minutes
Temp: 78

Details: We wanted to take a different approach to this dive and instead of just sitting around watching thing go by, we let the current take us and turned into a strong drift dive. This dive ended up being 43 minutes, max depth 76ft, visibility 50-60ft. Since this was a drift dive, i felt a little overweighted so stuck a little more around the boulders/rocks and took some pictures. You can only look at hammerheads for so long. We did manage to spot a school of manta and eagle rays. Now those were magnificant to see. They were so graceful in the water... WOW!!! Nothing much different from this dives than the rest. With the colder updrafts i did find several more eels, including a zebra eel swimming around. During our ascent, we heading into a school of blacktip and hammerhead sharks and slowly started to go up. It didn´t phase them one bit. Just before getting into the zodiac, Mark spotted a HUGE ray just hanging out below us, so we had to take a look, unfortunately i already handed over my bcd, so all i could do was hang on to the zodiac and look below.

Dive 3

Dive Site: Pinnacle
Max Depth: 100ft
Max Time: 60 minutes
Temp: 79

Details: Now this dive sounded interesting. This was more of a wall dive were swim thru´s, caves and even a very strong revolving current that they called a ¨washing¨machine were present. It truly was a different type of dive for us. My dive ended up being 40 minutes, max depth 81ft, visibility 50-60ft. Wall diving can be difficult, especially if you have trouble with your bouyancy. You don´t have a bottom, or at least you don´t know where it´s at, and you need to be very dependent on your depth guage as to not go too deep. We found a turtle sleeping on top of some rocks on the wall, it was pretty kewl, he hardly moved, but with all the sediment in the water, my picture looks a bit icky. I´ll have to wait until i get home to use my photo software to clean things up a bit. The first swim thru we hit was a small one. It went from low to high. Miguel decided to go a different way. Instead of starting at the low end, swimming up to the top end, we went to the end of the swim thru (top) and worked our way backwards so that we would be at the proper level for the next swim thru. It was pretty intersting. The next swim thru had one entry point and 2 exits. A hi and a low. I was right behind Miguel, so i wouldn´t have to deal with all the kick up from other fins. Problem here, we never knew there were 2 exits, and so i saw the lower one, headed for that, and then I see Miguel going for the top one. As I didn´t know where the lower one would take me, I tried my hardest to try to go back in and head up, but the current wouldn´t allow it and it forced me out. In the process, i grabbed on to rocks and got tossed a bit, and managed to get my hand cut, thru my gloves on some of the barnicles. The next obsticle of this dive was the actual pinnicle, where we will encounter the ¨washing¨machine. The idea here was to swim low, grab on to the boulders and watch the sealife whip around in circles as if they were in a spin cycle. We reached the pinnicle, I hid behind it with Miguel as there was no current, but mark went around to the front, not sure what he saw. So being the good dive buddy, i followed him... Next thing we knew, we were swept away into the blue. We were all so confused... I looked at Mark, Don and David and was like what know... So we decided we´d hang out a bit and then start to ascend. This current was sooo bad, we went beyond our own boat. We almost left the little cove area that we were anchored at. Later on, we find out from Miguel, that a few years back, before they had the sonar radios that were given out to buddy teams, that he was swept away from the pinnicle in the same manner. But that time the current was much rougher he ended up a few miles away from the cove and it took some time before they found him... YIKE!!! Glad he told us afterwards, not before... LOL

Dive 4 was back at Landslide, being that we went 4 times there already, i just decided to end my diving for the day. It was a good thing, i´m guessing the current was really bad because they never got to the end of the dive....

With our dives completed, it was time to take up anchor and head back to the other islands. Since we had to head against the current, this trip was going to be much longer that our trip out... It´s sure gonna be a bumpy ride, I´m so glad I´m not in the dungeon...