Dive #170 - Rich Torkington's Dive Log

Janel and I get ready for the next dive
Photograph by Linda Torkington in Belize 2004

Dive Journal: There is a mid-morning Nitrox course happening today, but for some reason, we never quite register the message that it is scheduled and that we can (and should) elect to get certified. That’s too bad, because Linda and I have wanted to get the Nitrox training and cert for a long time, and this trip would have been a perfect opportunity. In any case, today’s second dive is scheduled for mid afternoon.

We show up at the dock and find that Bo and Ricky have our gear all ready to go, and all we need to do is stretch on our wetsuits and boots and jump onboard. A pampered routine – we get used to it in a hurry!

The boat ride is barely 5 minutes to Black Beauty, a site just up from southern point of the atoll (the Elbow). It’s a beautiful afternoon wall dive and we start getting relaxed. The wall is sloped and disappears down to a midnight blue out-of-sight.

Right at the dive start, we run into a medium-sized loggerhead turtle who is pretty indifferent to us. Then a flurry of blue tangs rolls by. As I’m watching them, Bo points out a big silvery African pompano swimming solo along the sloping wall. Several great streaming schools of Creole wrasses pour over the reef and through us as we drift along with the mild current.

Nearing the end of the dive, we come across some odd U-shaped bones and a vertebrae spinal column, and we soon figure out it’s a big stingray skeleton. We then see at least 3 others all in the same area, and I fancy we must be in some sort of stingray “burial grounds.” Adding to the mystique, two big green moray eels are free swimming around the sight. We learn later that a careless fisherman recently netted and killed several stingrays there, and dumped them all on the reef. The morays were pigging out.