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Published: July 14th 2015
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Meet Michael
Michael is teaching me to be a better dive buddy. TURKS AND CAICOS
Meeting Michael
There are no inter-island flights in the Caribbean. In order to fly from one island to another you must fly back to the US. I had a layover in Miami and arrived in Provodenciales, Turks and Caicos at 9:30 p.m. I took a taxi, a van with six other people, to my hotel six miles away. It cost $43…I was astounded! The taxes on our hotel were as much as the fee for the room. Thank goodness Michael and I would be sharing expenses.
Because of the expense of the taxi I met Michael at our hotel, The Caribbean Paradise Inn at Grace Bay. I was delighted to see him again.
Our room had a balcony that overlooked the pool, but what was best about the hotel was the friendly accommodating staff. Wen, the woman at the desk, knew all about diving, and booked our dives for us. Michael had already had a two tank dive the day before I arrived. We scheduled two days of diving, two tanks a day. Prices for the dives were on par with hotel and taxi rates.
Reef Shark
If you stay quite still these lovelies will come close. We dove with Caicos Adventures. They had a dive shop in town with a huge selection of t-shirts, and some snorkeling gear and souvenirs. The boat was at a marina so a bus picked us up at the hotel parking lot. We were the first pick up. The driver made many stops and we were packed like tuna in a can. The bus was really full and I wondered how we would all fit on a dive boat. It turned out that many of the people were snorkelers and were on a different boat.
We boarded our boat and the captain, a big man, went over the boat procedures and the dive expectations on HIS boat. There was no doubt who was in charge. He was competent and capable and friendly, too. We set up our tanks and gear and the boat moved through the protected waters of a manmade channel into the open ocean.
The dive masters divided us up according to our experience and skill level. Usually the first dive was a wall dive. The walls in Turks and Caicos are unusually deep, 7000 feet. We were careful to stay
Linda
It is nice to have a buddy with a camera just over the lip, between 70 and 80 feet. I always feel a little tremor of thrill when I look over the edge into the depths. We swam through shadowy passages that contrasted with the glorious clear blue of the open water. Sharks often passed beneath us on the wall. The second dives were shallower and on reefs with innumerable reef fish darting here and there. On one dive it was almost like the fish were drugged; they moved slowly and I was able to get photographs of many of the more elusive fish. It was astonishing.
The boat had water and juice and served sandwiches and chips between dives. During this surface interval we enjoyed sharing stories with other divers and dive masters. One of our favorite dive masters, Michaela, had been a dive master in Sosua in the Dominican Republic and extolled that area for diving.
This would prove to be useful information.
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