Susan's Blog - Cozumel Snorkeling Day 1

So ... our main focus on this trip was Snorkeling, since we failed so miserably in Hawaii last year. We did our research (well, Susan did the research) and settled on a snorkeling and dive tour company called Cozumel H2O (http://www.cozumelh2o.com/). I'm not normally one to talk a lot about the tour companies and such, but this one, I wanted to give a shout out to and highly recommend it to anyone who happens to read our blog that is going to Cozumel. They are really amazing! While the guides are the first day were fine, Loes and Miguel are top-notch (so if you are going to book, I would say ask for them personally!). I also bought a very cheap underwater digital camera and tried it. The pictures (well, you can judge for yourself) are okay ... some are better than others. Day 1's pictures are the worst since I really didn't have the settings properly done. Day 2 and Day 3 got better. The Scuba day I don't have as many pictures because the camera was only rated for 10 feet and we went down further than that ... it just stopped working when I was too low and worked again when I came up.

We started with our guide for the day explaining all of the various types of fish and marine life that we may see, and the various underwater signals for each type.

You'll see a few pictures here and there of just water ... we were amazed at how clear the water was and how brilliantly aqua-blue it was in some places and then deep blue in others (in this first picture, you can see near the top the dark water line).

The first area was quite shallow and had starfish ... again, some pictures are better than others ... if you can force your way through today's bad pictures ... I promise they get better!

This will give you an idea of the depth .. you can see the bottom AND the top both in the same frame!

So this was the next part ... where I actually started getting fish in the pictures. So the camera has a setting for "close" and a setting for "everything else" and I (unfortunately) had it today on the "close" setting. So anything that was within 18 cm of my face came out pretty good and anything more than that is a bit blurry. You will see several pictures where the fish are REALLY clear which means they were also REALLY REALLY close!

And if you look in the middle of this picture, that black blob is a Nurse Shark!

This is a bit fuzzy, but if you look closely, you can see a huge school of fish.

And back to really close fish :-)

I tried to get a view of the fish against the white sand floor ...

I'm sure nobody is going to be able to see this, but there is a barracuda in this picture. If you go to the middle of the picture, and then look a little down and to the left, you may be able to see the barracuda up-and-down.

More just fish ...

This was trying to give an idea of just how many fish were around us. In this location, they were everywhere and very close ...

This was our guide diving down to the bottom as he had seen something (turtle, stingray) and was going down to point it out. However, I can't tell what it was that I was attempting to take a picture of.

Now ... I figured out after this snorkeling trip that I really didn't have the camera settings correct. Remember .... this is pretty much the cheapest digital underwater camera available, and I got it free based on some "points" I had somewhere. So after this trip, I actually started looking closer at the instructions and changed settings, so the 2nd day should be a bit better.