10: close encounters

our boat in the rain

The next couple of days were slow. What I thought was a dry throat due to a three tank dive turned out to be a cold. Lots of Prison Break was watched (although there still seemed to be thousands of episodes to go), and we kept seeing two old American ladies driving round and round town on a golf buggy: Clare kept saying "that will be us, you know". We ran into the guys we´d been diving the Blue Hole with (and American and a British couple) and sat in the bar drinking coconut rum when Clare spotted Jo and Nisha, our friends from Mexico. They were going snorkelling the next day and although we´d planned to leave we decided to stay an extra day and go out on the sailboat with them.

In many ways the snorkelling was much more satisfying than the diving. We stopped in three places and on the first stop we came upon a manatee, suspended in the water just watching us. Our guide Jacob had warned us that if we saw them we should stop swimming, and so we all lay suspended in the water ourselves, watching as it seemed to drift closer. From the distance came a second one, and they stayed there, the each of us observing the other, for a good 2-3 minutes. Without wanting to anthropomorphise them in to obvious a manner, there was something very gentle and intelligent about them; perhaps it was in the way they seemed to cross their flippers while watching us, in the same way we cross our arms. When they´d decided they´d had enough, they turned away and just swam elegantly and effortlessly into the distance.

manatees

It was a rainy day, but the water was very warm. We moved on to a second site called Shark & Ray Alley, and were immediately struck but the large number of fish in the water. At this point our captain started chumming with little bits of shrimp shell, which made the fish go wild.

Jacob handling a nurse shark

We entered the water and were surrounded by rays and nurse sharks. Jacob had obviously been handing them for a long time and as he swam down to the sand they approached him as if they were dogs or cats. I´m not sure how I feel about the feeding of the aquatic life. On the one hand, the presence of tourists guarantees the fish in the area an income of food, but on the other hand, they come to depend on humans. This was evident when simply by switching on the boat´s engines we were surrounded by sharks who had come to associate the sound with food.

That said, it was fun to be in the water with them. Nurse sharks are perhaps the least aggressive sort of shark that you could swim with; in fact they seem to spend most of the time sitting on their arses, unless you swim too close, in which case they will reluctantly get up and swim off grumbling. Being nocturnal feeders, it might be more exciting to see them on a night dive to see them ambush a crab. I do like them though!

At our third site we encountered a turtle and a moray eel, amongst loads of other fish. On our way back to the boat we saw someone doing "Snuba", which is a sort of cross between snorkelling and scuba diving. It struck me as though I was watching something about diving from the 50´s: a boy was on the sand, wriggling in the way that people do when they´re learning to dive and are not yet comfortable in the water; but he had no BCD or tank, and was breathing through a long tube attached to a sort of air dinghy on the surface. I´m sure it´s quite fun, but I don´t really get why anyone would go for an in between and not, if you´re interested in diving just, erm.... try diving?

The sun finally came out on our way back to shore, and we sailed back using only the sails, drinking rum and eating tortilla chips and ceviche (prawns pickled in lime juice with chilli and tomato and onion salsa). Another good day.