stubsadventures

If I had to name the one thing I was passionate about more than anything, it would be diving. There is something about the size and mystery of the ocean I have always been drawn to. It’s like a whole other world filled with things most people can’t even imagine and the ever-present danger make it a sport not for the weak of heart.

I like warm water diving but I’m oddly drawn to the colder dives. I’ve dove the Atlantic in April, northern Ontario in October and the rocky mountains in late September and none of those were warm. The coldest would have to be the SS Atlantic, which I dove with my father just a few weeks before I left NS (also, just several days before the time I did a 54km hike in NS with Poncho and we had to get helicoptered out but that is a different story altogether), to move to AB. The wreck had the title of the biggest loss of life in one ship wreck, before the Titanic. It was also a White Star Line ship! There isn’t much left of that wreck now, just mostly the steel, the boiler and hull and a few other sections and a big area where there is scattered china (the ships then used to carry cargo to make extra money), so the china didn’t have the White Star Line crest. It was funny, I didn’t feel cold at all, and when I got cold, I got messed up cold fast. It was ok because it was the end of the dive and it was time to go up but if I would have had to have done a long decompression… I can’t see that being cool. Regardless, it was badass.

In March 2011, I went to Mexico/Belize with a fellow adventure seeker (The Spocker). We did 9 dives on that adventure, the first two were cave dives in Mexico which were intense. 40 minutes of being in a tunnel under the ocean will get just about anyones heart rate up. In Belize we dove atolls, walls and of course… the blue hole. World famous, this is a must when diving in Belize. 145ft you bottom out at (you, not the hole) where you hang out and see some stagnates/stalagmites from when the hole used to be a cave, before the ice age. From there, you wind your way up the sheer wall, passing a school of sharks, then a bigger school of barracuda before doing your decompressing over a reef. This was the first time diving I had ever experienced narcosis (being narced). Easiest way to explain that is being high from breathing the nitrogen rich air. I had done some pretty deep dives and never experienced the symptoms and I was wondering when it was finally going to happen. When it did, I just cracked myself up a few times but I definitely didn’t hear any talking fish.

Here are some of the cool things I have seen while diving: 3 or 4 different types of sharks, seahorses, sting rays, lots of eels, ship wrecks, airplane wrecks, octopus, squid, fish that can kill, three-foot long turtles, buried town and its old dam, huge atlantic lobster, fossils in flooded caves, sunken drug running ships and more fish then there are stars in the sky, easily.

The bad thing about diving for a person like me, is that my imagination is always running wild. I actually have the thoughts about the shark coming out of the abyss straight for me. In and around wrecks can be creepy too, knowing you are close to a piece of history makes my mind go in a million directions. Having read lots of books about good divers who have lost their lives, you can’t help but think of them sometimes and it keeps a healthy little bit of fear near the front of your brain.

I mostly wrote this blog as an excuse to post a bunch of my diving pics for most of my first while diving I never had a camera but here are some pics from some of my latest trips.

Stubs.