After flying in for the third time in a year it still does not feel like home... I think it's too postcardish for that.

Cancun from above

The weather was beautiful in Cancun, but when we got to playa they just had a flash flood.
Luckily the good weather held out for the duration of our stay. Not that it matters a lot, underwater, in a cave!

I usually stay in Playa, it's close to the diving shop and it makes the logistics much easier. However, this time, we felt like staying at a resort out of town.

The mayan coast

After all it was August, vacation month, par excellence. We chose Puerto Aventuras some 20 kms south, right in the heart of Cenote Country (Ponderosa, the main training cenote was only a throw away, on the land side of the highway).

I recommend the place, we stayed at the Omni, and even got a decent price on expedia.
Nice beach, clean, comfortable. Our room faced the marina where tourists swim with dolphins all day long...



The first 10 days I spent doing tech training, in the open ocean and in caves. All went smoothly, although trying to clip two tanks in a dinghy in choppy seas is no mean feat.

The last open water dive was all the way down to 80 meters (267 ft) on Trimix 15% O2 41% He, travel mix 50% O2, 100% O2 deco gas. Bottom time 12 minutes, total run time 100 minutes. The havoc that the last hurricane wrecked on the reef is all the more clear when you see the mega sponges, still intact, at depths immune to these catastrophic events.

Most of the caves in this region are pretty shallow, so to do technical cave training we're limited for choice. We dove Vaca Ha, a tanic, no visibility bathtub size entrance, Tortugas, the same (the line comes all the way to the surface) and the entrance is single file for a certain distance. Mayan blue, that I already knew from my previous trip, was also deep enough. They all go down to about 30 meters, and you spend a significant part of a 2 hour dive decompressing.

These dives were done on Nitrox 37% O2 for the backgas and the main stage tank, and 100% O2, for deco on a 5L tank. You leave the O2 tank on the line, very close to the entrance at a depth of 3 to 5 meters. You have to trust that no one messes with it, other wise you're in deep... In Tortuga and Vaca Ha there was no one else, so not much risk of anything happening.

Tortuga is a great dive, an underwater canyon taller than wider, with a very pronounced thermocline slicing the canyon in half, shimmering under the intense focus of our lights. Quite a sight.