Utila - Scuba Certification

We arrived in Utila Wednesday afternoon/evening, after a 3 hour bus ride from San Pedro Sula to La Ceiba, a taxi ride to the ferry, and then a 1 hour ferry ride from La Ceiba to the island of Utila. The ferry was...interesting. I wish I would have taken Dramamine before riding. It's a bad sign when the boat crew passes out plastic bags as the boat leaves. I was fine for most of the trip...and then I started to fall asleep. Bad mistake. I woke up, gagged three times, but managed to keep it all together. Some other riders were not so fortunate. Nick did fine...

We arrived at the dock and were "greeted" with tons of people trying to get us to their dive shop. We hopped in a van (of the dive shop we had already looked into) and got some more information about the shop. We decided to stay at this place called Alton's Dive Shop, and we will be there until Monday or Tuesday.

Yesterday we started our scuba certification. We had to watch 2 videos, and then we did a confined water dive, which is just right off the pier. We had to do lots of skills, such as taking off our mask underwater, putting it back on, and releasing the water from inside the mask, all while underwater! There were a lot of other skills...probably like 20 of them! But we all passed (there are three students - Nick, this British guy, and me.)

Today we started off by watching 2 more videos, and then we went on 2 open water dives. They were AWESOME! We took a boat out to a marked spot and went diving for about 45 minutes. The first dive we went down 12 meters and saw a bunch of coral, a barracuda, some squid, and a bunch of fish. We came up for a break and boated to a new dive site. Down at this one we swam along a big wall of coral, and saw 2 eels!!! They seem less scary than snakes. Tomorrow is our last day of certification. We are going on 2 morning dives and then have a couple quizzes and our final exam. Then we're scuba certified! Part of the cost of the course includes 2 free dives, so we'll do that on Sunday. And, we might even stick around and do one more Adventure dive (maybe go to a ship wreck or something.)

I was a little uneasy at first, trying to only breathe through my mouth in the regulator, but after a couple of seconds underwater I was fine!

No spiders, no snakes, really no bugs at all.

However, the little bungalow we are staying in we share with Penelope, a gecko. And sometimes Penelope's little sister is running around too.

Internet is hard to come by, so this blog may not get as much attention as I had originally hoped.