Cenote diving with Geofish

[oldmaninthesea]

Hi Everyone
I'm in Playa del Carmen right now and just had some excellent cenote dives. I went with Gerrado from Geofish had had a great time. Gerrado knows the area well and has logged over 10,000 dives. It's a very slow week and I was the only diver signed up for the cenotes so I got personal treatment. We went to Chiken Ha on Saturday. The standout feature for me was the halocline. A very distinct line between the salt and freshwater layers. When you stick your head up from the bottom layer your see the surface of the layer as though you had come to the surface but of course you are still underwater.
Sunday was Dos Ojos, a must see for any diver. We arrived at the gates to the cenote at 8 am and had a good 45 minute headstart on the other groups so we had the whole place to ourselves. I won't go into a long description, you can find references here and some good video on youtube.
Geofish is a good operation. Since I am here alone and no-one else signed up for the Friday afternoon dive they took me out alone. I wanted to do a checkout dive since I haven't been diving since April and I went to Jardines with Irene who put me through a short refresher and took me down for a little over an hour. After we were down about 45 minutes she signaled for me to take her auxiliary regulator so as to extend the dive as long as possible. Saw some nice morays, 5 or 6 , and a ton of garden or sand eels. The highlight was a green moray at least 2 metres long under a ledge.
The coral here is in sad shape compared to Roatan. Mostly dead and broken up from recent hurricane damage. But the cenotes are the reason to dive in Playa and I had ideal conditions.
Thanks to Gerrardo, Irene, Max, Morgan and Steve.

 

[TSandM]

Dos Ojos was my favorite cavern dive -- the stone is so white, and the cavern gives you a real taste of what diving in the caves is like.

I have some significant reservations about your open water DM, though. How much gas did you have in your tank when you went on her octo? How good are you at regulator recovery? My husband and I often use air-sharing as a way of equalizing gas supplies where we have to use rental tanks, but we do it early in the dive, when both of us have large reserves, and we are very practiced at swimming while sharing gas, and recovering a regulator, should we be separated.

 

[oldmaninthesea]

I took it as a compliment to my skill as a diver that she would be relaxed enough with me to share her tank. This was a shallow dive, around 45 feet, just to get back in shape . She checked out my reg recovery skill at the start of the dive along with a few other skills and based her decision on that and how I conducted myself during the dive. This was in no way careless just a good dive.