Dive: 51
Belize Dive: 9
Date: 11/30/10
Site: Victoria Tunnels
Avg/Max Depth: 45/73
Temp: 81
TBT/CBT: 0:55/41:24
Buddies: Ted, Nick, Curtis, Kristen, Cindy, Ellie

After a fairly uneventful surface interval, Rudy took us to Victoria Tunnels. The highlight of this dive was a nurse shark that came to play. I skipped out on swimming through a really awesome tunnel when Rudy caught the shark. I’m amazed how they just let themselves be manhandled. I was touching it’s sandpapery back when Rudy handed the shark to me. It was heavy enough to start sinking me. Rudy gave it a fish while I was holding it. It got all squirmy until it was able to OMNOMNOM it. Very fun experience. I’m catching my own shark next time. Gonna rub its belly . . .

Here’s a still from Curtis’s video:

Dive 14

Curtis, Kristen and I along with newbie Jason set out for a morning of diving with Rudy as our dive master. Rudy decided to bring us to Victoria Tunnels since none of us had been there yet. He said there was a giant tunnel there that is really fun to go through, unfortunately we didn’t have a dive light with us so we wouldn’t be going through that one.

This time we were going to be descending a bit differently. Instead of one at a time we would be doing a drift drop where two of us roll of each side at the same time immediately followed by the other two. Curtis and Jason were first, Kristen and I followed.

We descended to around 90′ and immediately entered the first tunnel. It was pretty dark and it took my eyes awhile to adjust. There were a bunch of little silver fish that kept dive bombing us. Once we were through the other side we just explored the reef. As far as reefs go this was my favorite. There were a lot of cone shaped coral that looked like little hallow cacti with the tops cut off. They looked a bit out of place in the deeper water because the reef would have a seemingly neutral tone due to the depth, but then there would be a bright lime green piece of coral. There were also a lot of bright purple ones that would fade to a whitish transparent color toward the top. Maybe they weren’t as abundant in the other areas we dove, or maybe I just hadn’t noticed them before. They were neat. We also saw a couple different kinds of fish. There was a school of blue fish with these funny little fins that they flapped around like bird wings. I approached them slowly, keeping my distance and trying not to scare them away since I knew Curtis was behind me and probably wanted a picture also, but they didn’t seem too shy.

**BLUE BIRDY FISH AND CACTI CORAL PICS COMING SOON**

Jason was low on air and Rudy let him share his air for a while since we still had one more deep tunnel to go through. We came over the reef and descended to the second tunnel. I liked this one better than the first. The reef walls were split all the way up so it allowed more light in. I hit my hand on the coral by accident and it was all stingy, then while I was doing my underwater belly aching about my hand I hit my leg on the coral. Kristen was having ear problems trying to descend, so she and Curtis (good buddy that he is) went around the tunnel and met us on the other side. Soon after that we started our ascent. The safety stop is much nicer when the water is calm.

Once we surfaced we got to take off our gear before we got on the boat, which I much prefer to climbing a ladder with a bunch of heavy awkward stuff on. We headed back to the main dive shop for our surface interval. It was nice to be there and not have to fill out paperwork, this time we just got to relax. :D