First Night Dive

[ChrisEdwards]

My Son, 13 years old, and I did our first night dive off West Palm Beach, FL, on Saturday night. This was part of the Naui AOW course.

There were about 10 divers going off the boat and all had green glow lights. So I could keep an eye on my Son, and he on me, we attached a blue glow tube as well.

We dropped into the water and started to descend. I think I went a little too fast because I couldn't get my left ear to equalize, so I popped up and tried again. It took about a minute of this yoyoing before I was finally sucessfull. My Son did the perfect buddy thing and stayed right with me until I got it sorted.

It was actually pretty cool, because by the time I was ready to finally go down, I could see all the other divers directly below with their glow tubes and lights lighting up portions of the sea bed 70ft below. It looked like something out of a Spielberg movie.

The water was really clear and we had great visibility. We cruised along, on the current, about 4ft of the bottom. We saw a really nice sized Sea Turtle and about half a dozen Moray Eels, two of which were swimming along the bottom. We came across a large lobster walking along, and I debated whether I should try and catch him, bare hands, but decided against it. There were some divers that were catching lobsters, but they were about 30ft off to our left.

The ocean was teaming with all kinds of fish and we saw a huge puffa fish bigger than a basketball.

The sea floor dropped about 10ft as we went over a little reef area and then we saw it, a huge, well it was to us, SHARK, swimming along the floor, about 12ft directly below us. I think it was about 7 or 8ft long and we believe it was a Nurse shark. We trained our lights on it for about 15 seconds before it disappeared off in the distance.

Moments later after we just got over our excitement, I scanned around to see if I could still see the other divers and I picked up a large baracuda, about 6 feet off to my right.

Holy Cow, what a great first night dive.

 

[ThatsSomeBadHatHarry]

sounds like that was a blast. combo encounter with cool creatures. congrats

 

[proffumdiver]

night dives r great fun, i live in thaiand where the diving is mint. dropping into the ocean as the sun sets, coming up to see a sky full of stars. in some places u dive, u see more activity at night than at day, especialy dive sites that r heavily dove through the day.. but still 1 of my favorite types of diving. not too mention the quietest..

 

[namabiru]

Cool!!! That sure beats the heck out of my AOW night dive, which was in a training bay. One cute little fish sleeping, some sea cucumbers, a few urchins, and a whole lot of mud... bah. But I'm willing to give it one more try before writing off night dives for forever and forever.

 

[Jason Ooi]

Sound great fun night dives, Congratulation on your NAUI AOW certification

 

[diverdown247]

Glad to see you had fun Chris. Did you get your age issue worked out so that both kids could dive?

 

[goodeatsfan]

Sounds like you had one beautiful night dive! I hated my very first (claustrophobic), but now, I love them!

 

[ChrisEdwards]

Did you get your age issue worked out so that both kids could dive?

My daughter blew a little cool on the idea of becoming certified, she wants to wait until next year so I'm not going to push her.

 

[ChrisEdwards]

I must admit after the first dive, the second dive, an hour later was not fun. I did just about everything wrong, or so it felt.

I started to descend slowly, ears and mask were nicely equalized, and then I sank like a rock the last twenty feet. I think I was a little late on my inflator and couldn't slow my descent before hitting a nice bit of sandy beach 80ft under.

We followed a guy who was lobster fishing, but then drifted away from him and ended up over an 80ft sandy bottom with nothing to see. Our instructor had told us not go below 60fsw. We could see the glow tube of another couple of divers and I thought about swimming over to them, but their lights were all over the place so I think they were in the same predicament as us. My computer had reset the FO2 to 50%, don't know why, but I didn't know it on the dive, so I was getting O2 alarms inidicating I was at 1.65, so I struggled to get the attention of my Son to get him to hold a shallower depth. After about 35 minutes of just floating in a dark abyss, we called the dive.

I didn't figure out the F02 setting until I was back on the boat and my instructor pointed it out to me.

I'm pleased we had the good night dive first, otherwise I probably wouldn't have wanted to get back in the water if this second dive was our first night experience.