Ziray Studio Labs

On Christmas day, we woke up early, packed the car and drove 9 hours to the coast of Colombia. Colombia is the only country in South America that has a coast line on both the Pacific ocean and the Caribbean sea. Next time, we’ll try to make it to the Pacific coast for some diving.

When we got there, we had to park our car in a poor little town with muddy dirt roads and garbage all over the place. It wasn’t my car, so I wasn’t worried, but we also parked in a fenced off area where other divers had parked theirs, so we weren’t too worried.

We then took a 30 minute boat ride to get to the island in a tiny little boat that would later become our dive boat. No one spoke English so I pretty much was on my own to figure out what was going on, which is a really good way to learn a language, but not a good way when it comes to important things like how not to die on the ride over.

When we got to the island, our cabin had no hot water and no electricity; the water they did have was undrinkable, but they put a 2 gallon bottle of drinking water in our room. Electricity ran from a generator from 6PM to 6AM so that you could use the lights, charge any devices, but most importantly to have the fans on in the room.

Every meal was something that was locally grown or caught, so we ate a ton of fruit (new fruit I’ve never even seen before but terrifically delicious), fish and vegetables. It was an amazing experience and a real eye opener to how you can have really delicious food, electricity and water and still be sustainable on a tiny island like that.

Luckily for us, it only rained a little bit and was well after our scuba dives. Otherwise the temperature was perfect, as it is year round. Enjoy the photos below!

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Ana took me to downtown Medellín via the metro. It’s a lot different than from where she lives up in the hills of Envigado. Since it was right before Christmas, the crowds were terrible. She and her sister went around to a small place that had eight different shoe stores all right next to each other, no exaggeration.

After about two hours later (you know women) we took the metro further north to where the botanical gardens are. Admission is free, so it’s more like a city park but they have different places where they grown different types of plants. It was really nice and well maintained. Definitely worth a visit if you find yourself in the city.

I also got to try sugar cane juice, which is amazing. They take the sugar cane stalks and put it through a press, not unlike a cloths wringer, and juice just pours out of these things. They’re also amazing to eat but are a little stringy to enjoy all the time like that.

We also visited a ton of malls over the next few days. I was looking for some shorts to wear in the coast area where we were going scuba diving. Cloths in Colombia are magnitudes more stylish than cloths in the states. South Americans mainly prefer styles from Europe but you can find a few brands from the U.S. as well. I think I got to see almost all the malls in Medellin, of which, there are quite a few.

The photos below are from after we arrived until right before Christmas. Enjoy! Continue reading

In the afternoon, we did our third dive of the day on a place called Captain Tom’s Ledge. This was a bit of a deeper dive at 59 feet max, so the top of the surface was a beautiful 86 degrees, while the bottom was a relatively frigid 70 degrees. There is actually a layer of water that you pass through where you can immediately feel the difference in temperature. This is called a thermocline. After coming up from below the thermocline, the water feels like hot tub water. It’s really refreshing since you can start to get chilled wearing such thin layers. The total bottom time was 52 minutes.

Scott worked to get Juanca finished up on his scuba certification while Ana, Laszlo and I explored the ledge. The reef stands along a ledge that drops of to several hundred feet into the abyss. On the other side is a flat sandy surface nearly devoid of life. We stopped to get a photo shoot of ourselves as you can see from the photos below.

Laszlo had to surface due to constant condensation in his mask. But when we got back down, we were treated to a lot of Caribean lobster, moray eels and fish all over the place. We didn’t quite make it to the ledge because the reef was so wide. No bother though, not much to see but black ocean below you.

Captain Tom’s Ledge

Ana and me in front of the reef near the sandy bottom of the ocean.

 

Ana sees something interesting

Maybe it was this Caribbean lobster

 

 

 

An eel poking his head out to see what was going on

Lobsters were everywhere on this reef. Wish they were in season!

Looks like this was taken in a fish tank.

 

 

Can you see it?

On our fourth dive of the day, Laszlo and I performed our underwater navigation tests for our Advanced Open Water Certification (AOW). This was Juanca’s first dive as a certified diver, so he, Elena and Ana went off with my camera and took some pictures of themselves. We met back up after the test so some of the latter photos are mine as well.

If you are curious, it takes me 18 kick cycles to travel 50 feet underwater. We stayed under water for 45 minutes and even though we were only 24 feet deep at the max, we used a lot of our air performing the AOW tests, down from 3000 PSI to 850 PSI in the end.

Check out the photos below:

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After our deep dive on the USCGC Bibb, we used our second tank of nitrox (31% oxygen) for this very shallow dive to a max depth of 34 feet on Molasses Reef. The nitrox helped with fatigue and with a strong current. The current during our stay, we were told, was very unusual for Florida. Even so, it was a beautiful dive amongst beautiful animals and other ocean life.

Even though this was a pleasure dive, Laszlo and I practiced kick cycles and compass navigation in anticipation of our navigation dive for our Advanced Open Water certification.

Total bottom time was 52 minutes and I went from 3400 PSI in my tank to only 1800 PSI. Breathing nitrox definitely helped us consume less air, though the shallow depth also helps.

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