Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.
Benefits of registering include
Suit yourself, but that report was, at the most charitable, a gross exaggeration. I am on the island now and have gone on 10 two tank boat dives in the last 13 days. There is the occasional pile of dead finger coral that may have been there since Wilma, and live brain corals are not plentiful, but everything else looks very good. Palancar Bricks this morning was spectacular.
You're basically right, but to be fair it's a thick tube that inserted into your esophagus and Versed sedation is not quite enough. You need moderate to deep sedation to blunt airway reflexes for a few minutes, so we usually use small doses of propofol.
We dove Villablanca twice this trip; one of the dives was a night dive. They were both cool, but the night dive was outstanding, although the current was a bit of an issue. We saw (at night) at least 5 octopus (my wife got some great video), a very large lionfish (the only one we saw in 11 days of diving), and we had a close encounter with a big loggerhead.
After two undeserved hits, the advice to get checked for PFO is very wise and you should heed. You don't want the next one with neurological symptoms.
We got in right at La Ceiba and the lionfish was right after we got to depth at the top of the wall in about 60 FSW. The current was pretty strong, though, so I don't know how far we drifted as we descended. That's about as specific as I can say.
