Barbados - A Hidden Gem

The Active Divers Association just completed a week long dive trip to Barbados. If you are a fan of the various dive magazines and journals that grace our daily lives, you'll find several articles alluding to the "top dives sites" in the world. Often, the "top" site is defined narrowly, either by the kinds of fish you will see, or the corals, or the water clarity, whether it's family-friendly, or some other parameter. These are all important considerations, but it is a rare location that has it all: fish, corals, exotics, climate, good lodging, good food, friendly people, and reasonable prices. Barbados has all that and more.

Located about 1,600 miles southeast of Miami, Barbados has a unique position in the Caribbean. Its climate is very temperate for the Tropics, with an average temperature that rarely exceeds 86 degrees. It rains nearly every day, but doesn't last long. The combination of rain and sun makes for a lush paradise with many flowering plants and green grasses.

The people who call themselves "Bajans" are warm and friendly and, owing to their British heritage, it was a British Crown Colony until 1966, are somewhat proper. The Bajan economy is very strong and based on sugar production, tourism, and manufacturing.  Most of the tourists visiting the island are either from the United Kingdom or from former UK subject countries. They drive on the left and have interesting accents that can best be described as a cross between Jamaican, Creole, and British.

Diving in Barbados was phenomenal. The seas rarely exceed a few inches and visibility was usually 60 feet or greater. Water temperature ranges from 81 to 84 degrees in the summer. The reefs are healthy and the tropical fish life is abundant. We typically saw at least one, and sometimes several turtles on every dive. There is an ongoing conservation research conducted by the Barbados Sea Turtle Project (see: http://www.barbadosseaturtles.org/). On several occasions, researchers went diving with us and brought up juvenile sea turtles to tag and measure. At right, you see a hawksbill turtle looking up from a tastey meal. When you leaf through dive magazines, there is relatively little coverage of Barbados. Diving in Barbados is not heavely promoted nor wildly popular. There are only a handful of dive operators on the island. Indeed, our nine ADA members made up the bulk of the divers on every dive trip, and we rarely saw even one other dive boat on each of our reef trips.

Next month, we will publish an extensive article on ADA's trip to Barbados, including impressions from some of the participants. Be sure to look for it.

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Memories of My First Night Dive

Back in the late 1980s, fresh out of the PADI Open Water certification, I knew that to be a REAL diver I must get my Advanced Diver certification. Critical new skills I would add with this certification included navigation, deep diving, wreck diving, search and recovery, and night diving.

NIGHT DIVING!!??! I was excited about all the other aspects of this course, but was terrified of doing a night dive. Don’t sharks forage and feed at night? This could be the dealbreaker in my dive education progress and my desire to one day be a Master Scuba Diver, about 15 challenging courses ahead of where I was.

My dive buddies coerced me to sign up for the Advanced Diver course with my Open Water instructor Jane Schmitt, captain of her six-pack dive boat Lady Go Diver. She taught the courses at the Venetian Pool in Coral Gables and on dive sites off Miami Beach and Key Biscayne.

Even as I started the course, I had no idea how I was going to pluck up the courage do a giant stride off the boat into the black water at night. I purchased the cheapest version of a Pelican underwater night. “I don’t need a good light. I will use it only once, to get my certification,” I insisted to my fellow Advanced Diver hopefuls.

I thoroughly enjoyed and excelled on the more technical aspects of the course, navigation, search and recovery and deep diving. Jane promised to stick close to me and my buddy, Jim Naro, on the night dive. Together we would run through the skills tests, then I could ascend and leave the water.

The afternoon before the feared night dive, I prepared by doing two full circuits of high-energy Jazzercize, to put me in the best possible physical condition to face the black water.

On the boat ride out to the dive site, the simultaneous sunset in the west and the moonrise in the east were exhilarating. Perhaps this was a good omen. Conditions were perfect: flat seas, calm and quiet. Our dive site was the Biscayne wreck off Key Biscayne, 65 feet deep.

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Diving With the Three Stooges....
--by Carol Cox

As a dive master, you try to make sure everyone has a great dive and returns safely. Sometimes, you end up with the three stooges of diving. I ended up diving with Larry, Curly and Moe since they were on their own and the other divers on the boat were a group. I knew before we hit the water that this was a disaster in the making. They couldn't find their equipment, they didn't know how to put a regulator on a tank and they generally had no idea what they were doing. I asked one of them “when did you get certified” “Certified?” “Yeah, you know that little plastic card you pulled out of the Wheaties cereal box? When did you get yours?” “Oh that! Uh, last month.” (Oh no, why me?) I grudgingly helped them get their tanks together since I was in no mood to practice rescue diving.

They couldn't find their fins, one guy left his wallet in his car, their regulators leaked, their masks kept fogging up, you name it. We were doing an advanced dive so I made sure they all had whistles and mirrors in case we needed to be rescued as a group.....I can only rescue one diver at a time. This was a drift dive, so we all went in together. Curly immediately lost his fin. Larry swam over, retrieved it and smacked him on the head with it (I was waiting for a 'nyuk nyuk nyuk' from him but he had his regultor in his mouth). This was supposed to be a negative buoyancy dive to the bottom to drift along a wall. These three apparently thought they were butterflies floating in the breeze because when I looked up to see where they were, they were just drifting along about fifty feet above me enjoying the blue water. At this point, I decided to just leave them up there – less distance to cover when we have to surface.

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New Member Spotlight

This is the first edition of a new feature in the Mouthpiece that will help our members get to know one another. This month’s issue introduces three of our newest members: John Fernsler, Claudia Fernandez, and Braulio Aparicio, all of whom joined ADA on May 16th.

John Fernsler grew up in the Northeast Florida coastal community of Jacksonville Beach where in his younger years he was a competitive swimmer, surfer, ocean lifeguard and life-saving instructor. Trained as an architect and city planner at Tulane University and the University of Pennsylvania, John relocated to Miami in 1975 to open a Miami office of a Philadelphia-based architectural firm, a practice from which he is retiring at the end of 2015. Almost immediately upon his arrival in Miami, John became a certified diver and has been diving since then throughout South Florida, the Bahamas, and Jamaica. John is married to Christine and they have two grown children, John and Alison. All are divers, and on July 18, Alison also joined ADA with the July 18, dive at Islamorada. In addition to diving, John enjoys sailing and recreational flying as a private pilot.

John’s most memorable dive was a dive off Harbour Island, Bahamas many years ago. The divemaster had John and his wife fill their pockets with hot dogs which they were to break into little pieces and hand feed to a gathering of large groupers and goliath groupers. The moral of that story is be prepared to surface when the hot dogs are gone, as grouper don’t understand “no more” and cannot distinguish hot dogs from fingers.

Our next new member is Claudia Fernandez. Claudia has been diving since she was 14 years old. Claudia heard about the ADA through her husband Danny, who is a member as well. She was born and raised in Miami and have always loved the ocean. Claudia is employed at Florida International University and is currently working as an instructional designer designing and developing online courses.

Braulio Aparacio is the third of this month’s new members in the “spotlight.” Braulio has been a PADI open waters diver since 1988. He describes himself as “52 years young,” and is currently single. Braulio lives in Southwest Miami-Dade. He is the father of two children: his daughter Sarah son name Abram. Braulio has worked for 35 years as a plumber, and now practices that trade at Jackson South Hospital. His hobbies and interests other than scuba, include fishing and traveling. Braulio’s favorite dives are night dives, drift dives, and diving in the clear waters of Caribbean islands.

Please join me in welcoming John, Claudia, and Braulio to our club.

If you are a recent member within the last three years, and would be willing to tell us about yourself, please contact the author at roy@wassonandassociates.com.

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Where in the World Do You Want to Dive in 2016???

ADA just finished a spectacular dive trip to Barbados ( more on this in another article ) that will be hard to beat next year, so we need to start planning for 2016 now. Listed below are some possibilities and we would like to get your input on where you want to go. Feel free to suggest some that you want that are not on this list or simply vote for as many of these as you want. Send your votes to me at diverdaryl@bellsouth.netand I will use the votes when Dan and I start shopping the deals for next year. It’s always possible that the best deal is not on this list but rest assured, whatever we pick will get a lot of research before we book the trip.