Swim With the Fishies

Jonathan and I are here in Bocas del Toro, Panama – an island in the Caribbean side of Panama, not far from Costa Rica. It’s a beautiful island, though a bit touristy in nature, but at least not as drug induced as Puerto Viejo.
Back in early August, we started getting scuba certified. But, we chose not to do the open water dives (in Aurora Reservoir) since we knew we were going to be this way around this time of year. So, today we did our first two open water dives in Panama.
We’re going through a company called Starfleet Scuba. They came highly recommended to us by everyone. Anyone who knew anything about scuba recommended them. We checked them out, and quickly booked our dives. For just $30 more per person, we’re diving in the warm waters of the Caribbean rather than the nastiness that is Aurora Reservoir.

It was really great! On our first dive (at Dolphin Rock), my goggles fogged up a lot. It was to the point where I was really happy that our dive-master had on white fins with a black smiley face on them – he was easy for me to spot. It seemed like no matter what I did, they just would not clear. The dive was still fun though. I can’t tell if the water was really murky, or again, if it was due to my un-clear goggles. I didn’t really see much to say the least. But, Jonathan did get to see a shark! Our instructor tried to point it out to me, but I just could not see it. That’s probably not the best situation to be in…unable to see a shark that is only a few feet away from you.
After re-surfacing, we went to another location (Hospital Point – so named because Chiquita Banana set up the first hospital on the island for their employees). This time, my goggles stayed clear, and the water was much clearer as well. There was every kind of coral imaginable, and so many teeny tiny fishies swimming around. This time we got to see lots of lobster, trumpet fish, an angel fish, a mystery really ugly fish, and lots of anemone (one of which was super cool – if you got too close to it, it would suck itself into this tiny tube thing and completely disappear). We did not get to see the barracuda, or any sharks on this trip though. But, we got to practice a few more of our “moves” that we need to know how to do in order to scuba.
By the end, we’d done two dives of about 50 minutes each, and had a really great time. Our instructor is really nice and helpful. His name is Chumbo if you want to ask for him specifically.

We started at 9am, and finished about 1:30 pm or so. Then we went for some lunch at a fun place right on the water called Buena Vista Bar and Grill.


Oh – I don’t think I’ve mentioned that Panama’s currency is the US Dollar. It’s really odd to be in Panama using dollars, but it sure makes the conversion easy!

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