After over a month at sea and 50 dives, we came into the port of Saipan. We had 3 days on land and we needed to work for at least 2 of them. So you may wonder what did we do on our day off? Go diving of course. Yep - I find this rather amusing myself, but Friday morning bright and early at 6am I was prepping dive gear. Eight of us piled into a minivan and made our way to a dive site called the Blue Grotto. When you drive up, you can't tell that you are near the water. From the parking lot, it looks like you are on top of a set of sea cliffs and a good hike inland from the coast. So we geared up next to the van and made our way down a staircase that opened up into a vertical tube with 100' cliffs, a pool of saltwater at the bottom (complete with crashing waves) and a rock in the middle of the pool. The trick is to clamber out onto the rock so that you can jump off the far side into 30' deep water. And like the little crabs that scurry back into the water when they are spooked, we all tumbled off the rock on the far side, more or less gracefully. From there you drop down to about 40' deep and you can see that the tube is fed by 3 massive tunnels leading out to the open water at the base of the sea cliffs. The tunnels themselves are ~ 40' high and 70' wide and are the real highlight of the area. Once out in the open we found a wave-scoured area with numerous fish, fan and wire corals. All of these have been sparse so far around other islands in this archipelago so it was a treat. We even found Nemo.
I am off to prep more dive gear for now. We are back at work around Saipan.
I hope you have a wonderful day,
Cristi
No comments:
Post a Comment