San Juan, April 2018 (Part 3 - SNUBA Diving)

Although we both agreed to have a laissez-faire attitude during this trip, the one thing we committed to was to go snorkeling and diving.

Due to it's proximity to the tropics, the Caribbean is known to have some of the clearest waters in the world. This makes Puerto Rico an ideal place to go ocean diving.

According to international regulations, a person must be scuba certified in order to dive. Unfortunately, Audrey has not gotten certified yet.

After a lot of research, I stumbled upon Aqua Adventure, a diving tour company that offers SNUBA diving. A portmanteau of "snorkel" and "scuba," snuba is a form of diving where the swimmer uses fins, a dive mask, weights, and a regulator to breathe underwater. The main difference being that snuba divers are supplied air from compressed tanks on the surface rather than wearing them on their backs.

We would be diving near Culebra, a small island east of Puerto Rico. To get there, we met our guides at at 8 AM at Marina Lanais where their boat, the Day Off, took us to our dive site.

We were warned ahead of time that our hour-long trip eastward was going to be pretty rough, and boy was it ever.

After roughly an hour we made it to Culebra island. In my whole life I have never seen water as clear and as blue as in Culebra.

We stopped at our first of two dive sites where we snorkeled for a while. Before getting off the boat, I realized that my GoPro was nowhere to be found. I was devastated because I really wanted to take footage of our dive.

Fortunately for me, our divemaster saved the day since he had his GoPro Hero 4 with him and let me borrow it for the day. 

Since there were nine people that signed up for SNUBA diving, our divemaster took one group down at our first dive site.

This has been seen as a blessing for us, as Audrey and I both felt that we had already seen most of everything in the area since we had already been snorkeling for two hours.

When our divemaster returned with the first group we were all called to the boat for a light lunch and drinks. Once everyone ate, our guides fired up the boat and we moved on to Sand Dollar Beach on another part of the island.

The divemaster helped us put on our gear and hooked us up to the air tank. We hopped into the water where he gave us some basics so that we would be as safe as possible.

The water was at a perfect temperature so that one could stay in for hours. The coral itself was not extremely colorful but there was a wide assortment of aquatic life.

To be completely honest, there could have been nothing to see down there and it would have still been amazing. The fact that we, through technology, can breathe underwater is nothing short of magical.

Our dive lasted roughly thirty minutes after which we went back to the boat and took off the bulk of our gear. It was roughly 3 PM and most of the group was pretty exhausted at this point. Our guides got the boat ready to head back to Fajardo and fortunately the trip back was a lot smoother.

On our drive back to San Juan, we stopped to get a bite to eat at the restaurant Kasavista before going to the AirBNB for the night.

While on the highway, I reflected on what it's like to drive in Puerto Rico. Having spent a couple of years living in Ecuador and visiting there often, I had several preconceptions and expected the road system in Puerto Rico to be similar to that of some developing nations. I was severely mistaken.

The road system in Puerto Rico is very similar to that in the US mainland with a system of interstate highways and distances being measured in miles and feet rather than in meters and kilometers as one would expect in a mainly-Spanish speaking region.

The main difference is that all the signage is in Spanish. This reminded me a lot of driving in Quebec where all the signage was in French rather than the majority spoken English.

When we got to our AirBNB, we walked over to a 24-hour convenience store nearby to get some snacks. We ended the night relaxing and getting to sleep early after a long day.