A Little Bit of This and That.: Spring Break 2012

Every year my friends tell me about all the awesome adventure they are going to go on for spring break, and every year I have to stay home and work. But this year was different, I was the one who got to tell them of the awesome adventure I was headed on. This semester I took a scuba diving class, in order to get my advanced scuba license. And for spring break the entire class went down to Cozumel, Mexico. There was a total of 42 of us that went down there for the week.

We left the school at 3:00am Sunday morning in order to get to Chicago by 5am, to fly out about 7am, to get to Mexico by 9am. Then we went diving that afternoon after getting just a couple hours rest. I did a total of 10 dives the entire week: 6 boat dives, 3 shore dives (walking in from the beach), and one night dive.
I just want to say that this is the first time that I have ever, and I mean EVER been diving in clear water. Any of the lakes/quarries that I have been to have had the worst visibility any where, and the water down in Cozumel was like 100 feet (or more) of visibility. It was amazing.

Anyways, so some of the different animals that I saw down there was a Mola Mola (which is a sunfish), some sea cucumbers, star fish, 2 sea turtles, 4 octopuses, king crabs, a bunch of barracuda, some eels, lots and LOTS of coral, and a whole lot of tropical fish.
We saw the mola mola on the first boat dive that we did, and after we got back to the boat and everybody was on board, the dive master was super excited about it and freaking out and stuff, and we were all like "oh that's cool, it's a big fish." Not realizing that they live at around 3,000 feet, and only come up to the surface every so often. The one that we saw, must have been really big, because he was quite a ways away from us. Oh, we also saw a bunch of lobsters on some dives. OH!!!! Ok, so we were nearing the end of one of our dives, and I'm at the back of the group with my dive buddy and our instructor, when I look over to my left and there is this giant ray gliding through the water. I grabbed my buddies arm and pointed it out to him, and then waved my hands until the instructor saw it. I guess what we saw was a giant eagle ray, and the instructor said that it was the biggest one that he has ever seen and that it was probably around 12 feet across. Which was HUGE!!!! I was super excited because I spotted it all by myself. :)

Here are a couple photos from one of the day's that we went out.

Here we are getting onto the boat: