Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

Happily, the weather did calm down enough for them to open the port, so Bo and I did four dives over the last two days. The dives all had a moderate current, so they were effectively drift dives: we'd get dropped off from the boat in one location and the boat would follow our bubbles downcurrent until we surfaced. This meant that it was easy to cover a lot of ground, but hard to stay in one location for a long time to inspect small critters. Luckily, we had quite a few large critters to look at: spotted eagle rays, lobsters, sea turtles, nurse sharks, large groupers, barracudas, green morays, and angelfish. There are a lot of interesting coral formations here, featuring many passages to swim through and crevasses to explore.

I've been playing with my Go Pro camera in a flat-port dive housing. It's been interesting, because the camera has no viewfinder or display, so I have to aim it and hope. It's kind of freeing to not be able to perfectly compose a shot. It turns out that it takes decent pictures... if you're really close to the thing you're photographing. The lens is so wide that at more than an arm's length away, the subject is probably only a tiny fraction of the frame. I had the camera set up to take 2 pictures a second while it was on, and accidentally left it on for minutes at a time, leaving me thousands of pictures of nothing to sift through. There might be a handful of images vaguely worth keeping. I miss diving with Gina (for many reasons, but at least a little because I could be confident of having beautiful underwater photos to look back on).

Heidi ended up deciding that she wasn't into diving after all, and decided after her first day of checkout dives to not try to complete her certification. Because of the delay from the port being closed, she wouldn't have been able to dive with me and Bo anyway.

We've done some wandering in San Miguel, and watched a half dozen giant cruise ships disgorging passengers. Not surprisingly, the parts of the town near the cruise ship terminal are incredibly touristy, but we've managed to get out into the more normal parts of town a bit. I've found some tasty lime soup, and had what was probably the best mole poblano I've ever had with dinner tonight. I also (after much looking, since many shops were closed on Sunday and have sporadic hours on other days) confirmed that my phone is unlocked for use with international SIM cards. I now have somewhat-reasonably priced internet access on the phone.