Belize - Caye Caulker

After hanging around in Tulum for a few days, i decided it was time to go to Belize. Now, there
is really only one reason i wanted to go there, and that was to dive the Blue Hole. For those of you not familiar with it, this is a shameless quote from Wikipedia :

"The Great Blue Hole is a large underwater sinkhole off of the coast of Belize. It lies near the center of Lighthouse Reef, a small atoll 60 miles from the mainland and Belize City. The hole is almost perfectly circular, over 1,000 feet across and 400 feet deep. It was formed as a limestone cave system during the last ice age when sea levels were much lower. As the ocean began to rise again the caves flooded, and the roof collapsed."

I also shamelessly stole the picture from the Internet. I expect a lawsuit from the photographer any day now...As you can see, it is quite impressive from the air.

I travelled to Caye Caulker, which is a small island off the coast, so that i could be close to the dive site. Still, it took 2 hours by boat to get there.



"Caye Caulker. This picture is taken so that you can see how small it really is. If you look closely you can see the sea on the other side of the island, maybe 50 meters away. "








The dive went down to 40 meters, which is my deepest dive so far (i am only Open Water certified). I was a little disappointed i didnt get narced, as i was kinda looking forward to the sensation since alot of divers have told me how nice it feels:). We started the descent to a slope first, at about 15 meters. There were alot of sharks and Goliath groupers about, which was really nice. Just regular reef sharks, but there were so many of them it was quite a thrill for me. After the initial descent, we went into the hole itself. The drop is sudden, and the wall is vertical all the way down (well, at least as far as we went). When i hovered above it, i imagined it must feel quite similar to be in space. Just darkness below for hundreds of feet, with extremely limited visibility. We descended quite rapidly to 40 meters, where there is a cave of some sorts. Its really more like a large indentation in the wall, where stalactites and stalagmites have grown. We swam inside the "mouth" and behind the stalactites, and then it was time to ascend. We hung around at 7-8 meters depth for safety while we watched maybe 8-10 sharks circle us the whole time. They were only a few meters away and averaged at least 2 meters. All in all it lasted about 25 minutes. But it was all worth it:)

We did lunch on a tiny island which is also a nature reserve. While we were there, another group of divers came in for lunch at the same time. I thought to myself that i hope they paid more for their trip, as they had a much nicer boat. Well, after lunch we left for our third dive of the day and was gearing up. Suddenly we spot smoke in the distance and hear an emergency call. We gear down quickly and speed over there, only to discover that the nice boat we saw earlier is fully ablaze. Luckily, noone was hurt and we were able to pick up all of them and put them ashore on an island just a few minutes away.
Then we proceeded to do our third dive:)




"That sucker is really going. We heard later that it had sunk. While it was going on, i was joking with the other divers that when it sunk, thered at least be a new reason for divers to come here:) I also joked that this would look great in my blog, so i hope i was right:)