Sebastian asked me Friday if I wanted to come out diving on Saturday afternoon. He and his mate Gary were doing a tech dive and had permission to use a boat from work, provided we were back in by dark. They had a dive profile of 90 minutes, so they asked a few friends if they wanted to come out for a one-tank dive while they were doing theirs.

This was the first time I had been on DiveTech's boat TenAta since August 2000 when Brett LeMaster did his (then) recordbreaking 266ft constant ballast freediving record drop. That boat is set up for tech diving with a hefty ladder capable of holding a person with multiple tanks on, a wide, open dive platform and a big davit in the back corner with a hand-cranked winch on it for those REALLY heavy rigs that are sometimes required for very deep diving.

We boarded at the Cayman Islands Yacht Club and headed out through North Sound to the North Wall. It was a bit bumpy north, as we're expecting some weather shortly, so we hooked west and headed around to the West (Seven Mile Beach) side of the island which was nice and calm. We tied off at Orange Canyon, just off of Northwest Point in West Bay and prepared for the dive.

I was diving with Sarah (Seb's buddy Gary's significant other) and another girl, Chris who's S.O. was Stevie, the FNG at DiveTech. We dropped in and made our way down the mooring line and headed south into the current. We noodled around the pinnacle that marks the 'south end' of the dive site, but then continued on south to Sentinel Rock, the next dive site over. I didn't break 100 feet on this dive, and the girls stayed slightly shallower around 75-80. I looped around Sentinel Rock and we started making our way back towards Orange Canyon. I hadn't dived with these girls before, so I didnt know what their air consumption was like, and we were already 24 mins into the dive, so if need be, someone could have peeled off and made their ascent under the boat if need be.

Sarah saw a hawksbill turtle in the shallows on the way south, and when we turned north I saw a HUGE one coasting below me about 40 or 50 feet deeper. I just watched from where I was as my no-deco time was ticking away. We made it back to Orange Canyon, and I swam through the namesake and was relieved to see a lot of orange elephant ear sponges left. Some were gone, but a lot still remained, and they'll only grow more in the future.

I swung around back south again in the shallows and headed back towards the mooring line. I was down to about 5 mins remaining on my computer, so when I approached the line, I wrote on my slate “im out of time. see you on the boat” and began making my way up the line. The girls decided to come up then too. During our safety stop, I saw yet another hawksbill turtle making his way over the corals beneath us. He decided to come up for air right then, and once he was on the surface, the current carried him right over us. We were in about 12-15 feet of water, so I grabbed the mooring line with my thighs (only because I had a full wetsuit on) and used both hands to take some photos upwards at him. I got a few cool silhouettes of him, and then one of him heading back down after his rest/breath.

We hopped back on board and dried off and warmed up and waited for Seb & Gary to finish their profile and headed back to the dock. I just finished uploading a few of the photos to Flickr. If you're reading this the weekend that it was posted, you'll see the most recent 5 pics over on the right, but if you're reading this from the archive or got here from a search engine, you'll have to click over to my flickr page and see them there.