Scuba Diving in SABA!!!!!

I had so many pictures that I wanted to add to the blog! So I actually wrote 2 blogs today, both with pictures. Plus I added pics to the blog before that!! So make sure to check the latest three blogs to see all the new pictures!!! :-) (Oh, and the Saba blogs will probably make more sense if you read this one last.)

Friday morning, we met Alicia at Juliana’s restaurant at 7:45 for breakfast. Breakfast was included with our stay! They had lots of good things to choose from! Phillip got a bagel with peanut butter and I got a bagel sandwich with egg, cheese, lettuce, and tomato. It was really good! Then we checked out of our hotel rooms and walked back to the dive office. Our taxi driver arrived right on time! He was driving a van the day before, but was driving his wife’s car then because of some issue with the van. So we got to ride around in a bright green Atos! We don’t know how his Atos handles those roads…there’s no way our Atos would make it up those hills!!!!!!!!!!! He drove us back to the dock where the dive boat was. When he dropped us off, we paid him for the two days. We thought it was so crazy that he didn’t charge us the day before! He said we could just pay him at the end! Very trusting!!!! Seems like all of Saba is like that! So we checked in, met the instructors we’d be diving with, and got our equipment. Hillary and Steve were super nice and took great care of us! We headed out to the first dive site, which was like a wall and went down pretty deep!!! I realized quickly I was having problems equalizing my right ear. I tried everything, even went back to the surface and tried again. It just wouldn’t work. (You have to pinch your nose and blow out, which puts air back into your ears because the deeper you go in the water, the air compresses and takes up less space. So you have to fill that spot with more air. It causes pressure and pain if you don’t do this.) My left ear was fine and my right just wouldn’t work, so I couldn’t do the first dive. I got back on the boat and was soooo sad!!!! (There were two ladies on the boat still too…they were watching one girl who was getting certified. One of the ladies was snorkeling by the boat, so I jumped in and joined her for awhile. That was fun at least.) About 10 minutes after being on the boat, my ear started popping like crazy. It felt like air was coming out…weird! But then it felt normal again. So when playing in the water, I went under just a few feet and sure enough, I could equalize just fine. I don’t know what the deal was at first!!!! Their first dive was over soon after that though, but I was convinced I’d be ok for the second dive. Hillary was really sweet and didn’t want me to miss it either, so she said just the two of us would get in first and make sure I could go down. Then Phillip and Alicia joined us a few minutes later. (That worked well so that they didn’t have to waste their air in case it took me awhile!) But it was fine, no problems at all. And wow was I glad because that dive site was AMAZING!!!! (Phillip said the first dive wasn’t anything special really, so at least I got to do the good one!) We were diving beside pinnacles, huge rock formations under water. They were covered with all kinds of colorful coral and there were tons of fish everywhere. It was absolutely amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life! God’s underwater world sure is beautiful!!!!! I cannot even describe the feeling of seeing all of this! We went down to 70 feet! It’s hard for me to believe we can be 70 feet underwater and still breathe perfectly. Fascinating!!!!

We got back to the dive shop a little after 1:00. We changed into dry clothes and walked up the hill to a restaurant that Steve and Hillary recommended. It was really good! Then we walked to a souvenir shop. They had T-shirts, tank tops, and hats with sayings/info about diving and hiking in Saba. Phillip and I got T-shirts!!! They are so neat!!!! Then we waited just a few minutes and our ferry arrived! It was all planned so well! (The dive shops plan it this way on purpose for the ferry!)

The ferry ride back was soooo rough!!!! Phillip and I both put “seasick patches” on Wednesday night. Mine somehow stayed on during diving. Phillip’s came off, so he took a motion sickness pill with lunch. We were very grateful for these, because probably would have been sick otherwise! It was like a roller coaster, bouncing us up out of our seats even! Crazy!!! We enjoyed the sodas (Caffeine!!!!) on the way home and loved watching out the windows for flying fish! That’s right…flying fish! They were so amazing! They would jump out of the water and spread out their fins/wings and glide for a really long distance. Fascinating! The ferry ride lasted about an hour and 20 minutes. We were really glad to be home! It was a wonderful trip! I’m so glad we got to experience Saba!