All of us interns decided to get our wreck specialties, which means that we spend four dives mapping, planning, and finally penetrating a wreck. And yes, the actual technical term in diving for entering a wreck is “penetration,” so you can only imagine the wide array of jokes that go along with wreck diving.

There are two wrecks in Roatan down near West End, the Aguila, and the Odyssey. Earlier this week we spent an entire day diving the two. Dive #1 is just exploring the outside of the wreck. Since Holly and I had already done esentially that for our advanced training, the two of us jumped right into Dive #2, which is the mapping dive. We did this at the Odyssey, this massive wreck sunk down at 100 feet, and she is gorgeous. She is slanted at about a 45 degree angle though, so looking at her makes you feel completely disoriented. Deep diving, which by PADI’s standards is anything greater than 60 feet, has the same mental effect as downing a couple drinks, and so that sort of tipsy feeling combined with knowing that up is one way but seeing a ship oriented at an angle makes for quite a trippy experience, and that was only looking at the wreck from the outside. We’ve yet to penetrate.

Our second dive was at the Aguila (also about 100 feet) and since everyone else was doing their mapping for that dive, Holly and I were given the freedom to just have a fun dive. The Aguila is always surrounded by these massive groupers, and one in particular with a scarred lip will follow you around if you are carrying your spear because he knows you will feed him. We spent a good while playing with him (he is about the size of me), and then examining the garden eels, which look like a bed of sea grass but upon closer examination, it is hundreds of little eels poking out of the sand. With all the fun we completely disregarded our computers’ readings of our remaining bottom time, and accidentally went into deco. Basically, while everyone else finished up their dive and was chilling on the boat, Holly and I had to sit at 15 feet for half an hour, hovering next to the drop tank should one of us run out of air. I wrote a note to her on my slate saying “This feels like time out” and we both burst out laughing to the point that we couldn’t keep our masks from flooding with water continuously. Half an hour later, we emerged, cold and humiliated to the rest of the boat calling us the “deco divas.”