Night Diving

I’ve never been a huge fan of night diving. I did my one night dive for my AOW certification at what used to be called Clear Springs Scuba Park in Terrell, Texas. The facility has since been renamed The Scuba Ranch. My thoughts on that one was, “Meh, not much to see here”.

My first “real” night dive in the ocean was off Sunset House on Grand Cayman in 2018. The setup there is you enter the water from by either giant stride of descending a ladder to the sea pool. Across the enclosure is an outlet to the ocean. There is a sand trail that leads out to the Siren of the Sea statue. Depth is about 55 ft. We started out with a fairly large group. Among us were the two Scuba-Commander owners Annette and Johnny, both PADI instructors, one active divemaster and one inactive, one rescue-certified, several other AOW divers, most members of one family and me, a newly made PADI instructor. Upon reflection, way too large a group to manage even without incident. But incidents will happen.

We made it out to the statue without any issues. I started having light problems. I had a camera light for my primary and it began to act up and not work properly. So, I went to my backup light. Backup had weak batteries. Should have checked them earlier in the day and replaced them. So, there I am with two sketchy lights. My buddy had one that was working so I stayed pretty close. We were finning along as a group when suddenly, Annette and Johnney disappeared. Later, would learn that Johnny blew an o-ring on his tank, so they took off back to the resort. The rest of us surfaced to collect ourselves. At that moment, another diver said his BCD just broke. Before I could get over to him and see what was up, his son took his weights then they both took off. (His top release valve had come unscrewed. I could have fixed it in about 20 seconds.) There I was with 4 other divers on the surface and two others still underwater. I decided we would surface swim back to Sunset House. And it was a long way. About half an hour later, we were back at the sea pool. We waited for our other two divers to show up. About another 15 minutes and we saw there their lights. While some of us were dealing with our incidents, they had been chasing a school of tarpon and had a great dive. Glad someone did.

Four years later and I’m in Cozumel with some of my Texas peeps. Down there we use Dive with Martin. This year they started a new trip called the Twilight Dive. It’s a two-tank dive with one starting in late afternoon, then a surface interval awaiting sunset then a night dive. In our schedule, the next day was a non-diving day so I decided to go. One other in our group went also.

My first diving instructor at Grapevine Scuba had said if you want to see the real colors of the reef, go night diving. By day the reef colors are filtered through the blue water. At night, the blue effect is gone, and you see the true colors although you need a light to do it. Night is also when other sea creatures not normally seen in daytime come out. This is when octopi are most active, although I did actually see one in Grand Cayman during the day. (The only macrofauna seen on that trip.)

Wow, what a difference! Dive with Martin always has given great service on my previous trips. We went in just as the sun dropped below the horizon on Yucab Reef. I have dove on Yucab many times before but always in daylight. It’s a fairly shallow dive, only 40-60 ft. There is always a lot of sea life there. I have a lot of video from those dives. But this dive was totally different. After two sketchy night dives, I had one of the best times on a dive trip; giant crabs, lobsters and octopi galore.

I was with a fairly large group so getting good video sometimes required a bit of crawling around rocks and other divers. Most of the others who doing video had huge camera set-ups and there was me with my little GoPro Hero4 on a stick. But it makes for an easy time getting good footage. Here’s one of the best bits of footage from that night.