Watching the Watchers
2009 Anywater Sports April 11 thru 18...or 19th....or 21st (depending) trip to Scuba Club Cozumel
31 of our best friends, 25 of whom are divers, traveled night and day to arrive at our favorite destination for the most relaxing week of diving imaginable. The hospitality of the SCC staff remains unparalleled with the familiar faces of Sophie running the front desk and living quarters, Mario and his staff serving up tasty foods and drinks, and especially William & Juan for shepherding a top notch dive shop and the best dive masters, crew, and boats on the island.
The theme of this trip is Watching the Watchers, where natural light was used throughout due to the clarity of the water and scenic nature of the photographic landscape. All (with one fun exception) of the underwater photographs have been converted to B&W to tease out the texture of the environment. The photos included here were imaged with a Canon 10D & Canon 15mm Fisheye lens in a Subal C10 housing and processed via DxO Optics Pro and Photoshop. The weight of this gear above water is in the 10lbs range while underwater it is ever-so-slightly negative, about the weight of a balloon.
After a rewarding week of drift diving, it was time to return home – mostly through Houston – on Saturday the 18th. Unbeknownst to us, however, Houston was closed for the day with 28,000 travelers due to severe lightning storms. The flight out of Cozumel was 7 hours delayed. Once in Houston, we found that many connecting flights were canceled or delayed. Some folks were able to make the mad dash to their waiting connections, others were delayed for two and a half days. Those who managed to work with Claudia, the airline translator cum ticketing expert extraordinaire working at that point an 18 hour day, managed to get home with only a 12 hour delay – a most excellent rescue at 3:00 am with a Plan-A consisting of stand-by seats for a morning flight as well as a Plan-B consisting of First Class seat assignments 8 hours later, meal tickets included to cover breakfast and lunch while we waited.
