130 feet into Blue Hole with reef sharks
The main tourist attraction of Ambergris Caye is actually a two hour boat ride away over the open sea (read: choppy). The Blue Hole is a giant limestone sinkhole just below the surface. Outside the sinkhole, the water is only a few feet deep, inside it goes straight down to 400 feet.
We were a little scared to try this dive since the sights don't really start until around 130'. That's about twice as deep as we've ever gone and we'd only done nine dives up until that point (ever). If you're reading this then you know that we did it and survived!
The dive follows a shelf at 45' and then hits a ledge. The ledge drops straight down to bottom. Which you can't see. So you're sinking down, with absolutely nothing below you (that you can see) for hundreds of feet. The water is totally still and crystal clear. There are no (or almost no) fish. It's totally surreal. Angela and I stayed very close to the dive master the whole time.
One of the scary points of the dive was towards the bottom when Angela had a brief bout nitrogen narcosis. All of a sudden she got dizzy and light-headed. Luckily the cure for nitrogen narcosis is to just kick up a little ways. So that's what she did.
At around 120 or 130 feet we saw the sight above. This picture isn't from our dive, but I'm hopeful that one of the other guys on the dive is going to upload some shots from our adventure to his site. I'll update with links to his images when I've got them. Anyhow, this is what you see. It's crazy. There are these giant limestone stalagtites that are... huge. According to some unknown criteria this dive is (by some) included in the top three dive sights in the world.
Because we were so deep (our maximum depth was 131 feet) we couldn't stay down there for very long without going past the decompression limit. Someone else can explain it better than me, but the bottom line is that if you breath super-compressed air for very long you end up with too much nitrogen in your blood and you'll get the bends if you ascend too fast.
We ascended very slowly.
At any moment there were 4 or five Caribbean reef sharks in view. These sharks look like sharks. Nurse sharks are a lot slower-looking and have smaller mouths. These reef sharks are grey on the top and white on the bottom and they look like serious predators. They look like Jaws. But only 5 1/2 or 6' long. I say "only", but Angela and I were guessing they were 8 or 10 feet long until someone on the boat corrected us. They looked bigger.
As we sat there, hovering at 15', these reef sharks got closer and closer. Since no one else seemed bothered by it, I was more excited than scared. When we got back to the surface we learned that some of the dive masters chum the sharks so they were checking us out to see if we had any food.
Anyhow, the experience was nothing short of awesome. Swimming with sharks was a big deal for me (I saw Jaws when I was too young) so I was pretty thrilled that it turned out to be more fun than terrifying.
