The Bahamas
Spring break in the Bahamas was something I had to do in college, only instead of the usual hotel and party scene, I decided to go for sailing and scuba diving. After getting hooked up with Blackbeard's Cruises through Cornell (under the guise of the trip being a phys ed class), it was off to Miami to set sail.
Captain Ron and The Pirate's Lady
Yes, the boat really was driven by Captain Ron, only unlike in the movie, he and the rest of the crew were quite competent (especially the chef!). Unpacking was pretty simple: dive gear goes in a locker on deck, everything else goes in your bunk with you.
The Pirate's Lady was a 65-foot sloop-rigged sailboat capable of carrying two dozen passengers and six crew. Before leaving, they did an orientation of the boat and asked if anyone was carrying illegal drugs, firearms, or GPS receivers. GPS receivers?! Yep, having the precise locations of prime dive sites is a valuable asset that they were looking to protect.
Bimini
We spent one night in port on the trip, giving everyone a chance to get a fresh water shower and some Bahamian culture. Bimini, famed hangout of Ernest Hemingway and filming location for the final scene of Silence of the Lambs, consists of one street (paved, but only one lane wide), two bars, a few shops, a seaplane terminal, and that's about it.
The bar where we ended up has a room which serves as a Hemingway museum, replete with pictures of him reeling in 700-pound marlin. The other bar in town had recently been renovated, much to the chagrin of the crew, who mourned the passing of it's "shack with a sand floor" ambiance. Before hitting the bars and live bands, though, we had a big cookout on the dock, with steak, lobster, and a variety of fish.
The Typical Day
Since the itinerary was made up on the fly, there wasn't much of a typical day, but they went kind of like this: Roll out of bed around 7:15 when the bell rung on deck announcing breakfast, then get things together and set up a tank for the first dive of the day.
Between dives, there was usually a few hours to get some sun, read, or just enjoy the view. We sailed when we had the wind, trailing fishing lines behind and waiting for the whir of the reel and someone going "fish on!". Mostly we got barracuda, which were saved for shark dive bait, but there was one 40-pound grouper which made for a tasty dinner.
After a second dive and lunch, it was time for some extra surface time and a diversion such as beach combing a deserted island or freediving with a pole spear for fish and lobster. Dinner was preceded by the third dive of the day and followed by a night dive. It was really something to get suited up under a full moon before diving into the surreal environment of dark water broken by UFO-like beams of dive lights playing over the reef in search of lobsters and other nocturnal creatures.
The Alma B
Our last day of diving got off to an odd start. Coming out of port in Bimini, we headed south to the first dive site only to happen upon the sight of the bow of a ship poking out of the water at a rather odd angle. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be the Alma B, a supply ship the crew was used to seeing around Bimini. After a handful of remarks about making an impromptu wreck dive and marking the coordinates for future trips, information started to come in.
The ship had just sunk the night before and we were one of the first boats to come across it. Of the five crew, one had swum to shore, one had just been plucked from the top of the ship, and three were still unaccounted for. The captain and two of the crew grabbed tanks and went down to check for survivors, but only found two bodies. The authorities on land wanted them brought out and our dive plans further detoured by corpse ferrying, but much to my relief, they loaded the bodies on another one of the many boats converging on the wreck.
Resuming our dive plans, we followed the debris trail of the ship's lumber cargo, keeping an eye out for the remaining crewman amidst much radio chatter and searching Coast Guard helicopters overhead.
The Diving
The diving, of course, was excellent. I racked up 17 dives in five days, adding a nice bit of experience to my previous four certification dives. There was tons of stuff to see under water: all kinds of fish and coral, rays, lobster, even sharks. We did a shark feed where we got to watch a dozen 6-foot reef sharks (and one fearless grouper) feast on fish bait. They attacked it with such ferocity that they ripped the pole right off its tether and put a nice bend in it. There was also plenty to been seen from the boat, including dolphins, turtles, and and eagle ray.
Pre-dive briefings were always fun, with a mix of real fact, outrageous embellishment, cartoon drawings of the site, and a fish-of-the-dive to look for. Some of the sites had great names, too, like "Grouper on the Head", named for an irate female diver who got hit in the head by leftover grouper parts thrown overboard by fisherman.
