Can you believe that I have managed to live in Belize for 6 years, without having been scuba diving once? I do have my PADI advanced Open Water certificate & love diving, but I just haven’t had a chance to do so whilst living here. For all this time, we were either too busy building our business or I was pregnant or nursing. So I’ve never been on more than a short snorkeling trip (which are great trips too, by the way)

Anyhow, yesterday I finally went on a proper scuba dive. And it was brilliant! My dive master Marcos was just amazing. The sea life we encountered on the two different dive sites were acting like they were all his personal pets. I’ve never seen anything like it. He didn’t even feed any of them, but he just seemed to communicate with them by touch.

Through Marcos’ help, we were able to pet a giant eel and tickle a nurse shark. The eel was actually a ‘friend’ of his. He calls her Esmerelda and he had been looking for her for over a month. He was so excited when he found her again. I have never seen a man beam over the sight of an eel before, but Marcos surely did when we got back to the boat and he told us about how Esmerelda had been hiding since Hurricane Dean had come near.

We also swam right beside a turtle, tons of other nurse sharks, a stingray, a parrotfish and we got kind of ‘attacked’ by a Moreno fish? I forgot the actual name of the fish, but it was a fish that normally attaches itself to a shark or a whale & had obviously lost its host. It then tried to attach itself to us as we were hovering around waiting for our ears to equalize on our way back to the surface. It kept trying to nibble at my hair and in the end the dive master had to punch it to get it to move away from us.

All in all, it was a fantastic first diving session. And I definitely won’t wait another 6 years to dive again.

Oh, and I will try and get hold of the pictures that were taken by the dive master later today