Belize: Scuba Diving

Scuba diving was really the main point of our trip, and we loved it. We used Belize Diving Services on Caye Caulker, who did a great job. They had nice new equipment  great staff, nice boats, and we felt very comfortable with them. Every morning we'd meet at the boat, drive 30-60 minutes, drop in for our first dive, come up for lunch/snacks/swim/surface interval, and then head down for another dive before going back to the island. Most of the dives are what are called 'wall dives'. You head out to a coral reef where you drop into the water so about 50' and then there is a sharp wall that drops off. Could be 50 feet, could be thousands of feet. There's lots of coral and fishies and other sea life. yay. Out waterproof camera only manages 40 feet so we were way over its range. I've got some photos from the boat, and I'm a bad person and stole a few from the internet to give you an idea of what some of the pieces were like.

We saw a spotted eagle ray, lots of barracuda, lion fish, lots of nurse sharks, reef sharks, a turtle, and lots of other fishies and wildlife.

Our first dive we had been told we might see some nurse sharks at the end of the dive. Instead we dropped in and immediately saw 5 nurse sharks below us. Minor hyperventilation later, we were all good.

The last day we went out the the 'Great Blue Hole' which is one of the big things Belize is famous for. It used to be a cave system and when water levels rose, it went underwater and one of the cave roofs collapsed, creating a 400 foot deep hole. There are reallllly cool, huge stalactites at 125' feet. Which is way deeper than we had gone before, but was so worth the 8 minutes of bottom time. Coming up, we saw a number of reef sharks as well. We also did two dives at Half Moon Caye that day, and had lunch on the island, which is a Red Footed Booby reserve.