What if those of you that scuba dive had a chance to spend a week on a liveaboard doing some amazing diving in the Bahamas? Would you raise your hands to go? What if I told you there’d be 20 guests and 5 crew members on a 65 foot sailboat with three toilets and one shower for everyone? And you’d be sleeping in a small berth about two feet wide and six feet long? Would you still keep your hands raised?
Well, I somehow I kept my hand raised. It ended up being a wonderful experience. I was really happy to begin the trip, and extremely happy with the diving, the crew and my fellow divers. And I was definitely happy to get back to having my own room and shower once the trip ended!
We ended up doing 17 dives during the week. The only downside was that we had high winds the last two days so we did shallower dives as the boat sheltered on the leeward side of some of the islands. So while we didn’t see some of the highlights of the Bahamas, including some of its wrecks, we still had a lot of beautiful, more shallow coral dives.
The Washing Machine
One of the funniest dive experiences I ever had was on The Washing Machine. We entered the water in one big group with a dive instructer in the front and another in the back to keep us together. Then we went through a fast stretch of water where we were churned together multiple times from 40 feet deep to 15 feet deep. As you can see from the video it was chaotic fun and way too short!
Reef Sharks!
What do you get when you put a bunch of mackeral and water in a bucket, freeze it, take it out of the bucket, drill a hole through the center, and the put a line through it? A sharkcicle!
Our crew used it to feed the local reef sharks on one of our dives. Because it was frozen solid, it took three sharks and some smaller fish about 30 minutes to go through it.
Sea Life
There was a lot of wonderful sea life besides sharks. Below is a sampling of what we saw.
Pablo’s Plane
One of Pablo Escobar’s planes was heavy with contraband and flying low near the water during a storm. One wing hit a wave and the plane then tumbled into the ocean. It was one of our dive sites.
Coral
One of my favorite parts of diving in tropical climates is the coral. While the Bahamas doesn’t have a large continuous reef like many locations, it has a plethora of wonderful coral formations. Below are just some of the examples of what we continuously saw.
Dog Rock is a site with a large coral wall and a number of great pass throughs. It felt a bit like being back in Cozumel.
The places we dove (sometimes for multiple dives): Madison Avenue, Pillar Wall, Crab Mountain, Pillage and Plunder, Dog Rock, Smugglers Plane Wreck, Basketstar Reef, Hammerhead Gulch, The Washing Machine, Baracuda Shoals, Ray’s Reef, Lobster No Lobster