San Salvador Vacation Pictures

Baracuda

Another trip back to Club Med Columbus Isle - Bahamas December 2008. A wonderful trip the week before Christmas. The weather was much better than back home where it was snowing. The air temp during the day was about 78 degrees F but with the wind blowing at over 15 mph it felt a little cool when the sun went behind the clouds. Polartec jackets were the norm on the dive boat between dives. The wind made so much chop on the water that the dive boats could not leave from the Club Med dock all week. Instead we traveled by bus to the nearby marina where they parked the dive and snorkel boats. On the day we were leaving the wind had died down and the dive boat picked up the passengers at the dock.


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The water temp was also about 78 degrees F. This is cooler than the summertime temp but that makes the chance of seeing bigger animals more likely. We were not disappointed. We saw hammerheads on three of our six days of diving. The other days we saw black tip reef and nurse sharks. Unfortunately pictures of sharks are hard to get due to how well they blend into the background and how much the sharks hate the bubbles from all the scuba divers that chase after them. My hammerhead pictures look mostly like blue water.

We also had the luck of seeing a Humpback whale from the boat on the way back to the harbor and a pilot whale between our first and second dive. The humpback was less than 200 feet from the boat and the crew claimed it was the closest they had ever been to the boat.

This was the first use in salt water of my new digital Olympus Stylus 770 SW digital camera and underwater housing. I don't have an external flash for the camera which means I need to get really close to my subject before taking the picture unless I want a lot of blue in the photo. While I miss the strobe from my film camera the ability to know instantly how good the photo you just took is going to come out was priceless. I came back with about 450 photos which I deleted down to under 200 but only 4 made the website due to space limitations from Yahoo.

The one fish we were surprised to find for the first time in the caribean was the lionfish. They are native to the Indo-Pacific region of the world but have now become an invasive species in the Caribbean. They were on several dives and they allowed divers to approach very closely but we had to be careful since they are venomous.

Overall this was a wonderful trip.


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