Dry Tortugas!!!!!

So, I had these great intentions of writing up the trip in the evening, but.... this is as far as I got:

Day 1 - Seven dives, pretty tired, maybe I can just get up early and do this in the morning.
Day 2 - Wanted to get back in water, didn't have time to blog this morning, six dives, maybe if I take a short nap, I'll have the energy to blog today.
Day 3 - Wow - slept through the night, woken by the engines starting - time to get in the water.

So, the truth is that I was really focused on the diving and not the writing part of the adventure, so I'll recap for those of you that didn't make this trip.

The bottom line is that the bunks were small, the food was well... hot and plentiful, but the diving was fantastic!

This boat is a converted oil rig tender and is purpose built to be a work boat converted to a dive boat. The amenities are not plentiful, but it makes it easy to make 15 dives in 3 days well off-shore. I was really surprised by the diving and compare it to some of the best Caribbean diving that I have seen including Roatan's north side. The reefs themselves were in very good shape with large amounts of sea life. There are a large number of mooring buoys put in by NOAA so reef damage was minimal to none out there. I saw fishing line on one site and no garbage the whole time out there, which is a change form a lot of the other countries I have visited in the last couple of years. Viz ranged from 40' at it's lowest point to a little over 100'. One of the dives the water was so blue you would ave thought you were in the Indo-Pacific.

We left the dock at about 7:30PM and arrived on the site at 9:00AM the next morning. The sea was a little rough on the way out and I wedged myself against the wall of the bunk to get a good night's sleep. A good breakfast got us started and we made three dives before lunch, three after and one night dive. We moved into the lee of Fort Jefferson for the night and then out again to arrive on our dive site at about 8:00AM with three dives before lunch and three after. The night dive was cancelled because the crew thought there wouldn't be enough surface interval before the deep dive on the Baja the next morning. During the night we moved close to the wreck of the Baja and then at 6:45 on the nose, the engines started and they hooked into the the wreck. We dove the wreck and then moved to the nearby Air Force tower. After those dives, back into the dock at 5:00PM.

It had been a while since I had been on a liveaboard, and it take a day to fall into the routine of the ship and understand how the crew runs things, but being out there makes me want to go for a longer liveaboard trip again.

I did a quick edit of the pictures int he slide show to get them out. We are already planning another trip out there, so if you don't mind small bunks and hot food this is really a trip you can't miss. Greg