But that lobster isn’t! (More about that later….) We had a great couple of dives this past Saturday, June 28th, to celebrate the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York City. Pinpointed as the beginning of the modern Gay Rights movement, this day has always been special for the entirety of the LGBTQIA+ community. We were onboard instructor member Skip VandeLinde’s boat Shark Bait which is run by his company with his husband Jeff called AquaLife Divers.
They were kind enough to let us decorate the boat with gay pride pennants and each of our divers was given a pride flag to take down on the dive with them. (All flags were successfully brought back up!) With us on the trip were Andre Saade, Christopher Duncan, Ken Gioeli, Martin Howley, Stephen Lautner, Mark Lazo and another instructor member Eric Taylor. You can see Eric showing his pride and his buoyancy skills in the cover photo for this dive report.
Our first dive was on the Aqua Zoo, which is actually part of the Sea Emperor wreck off Pompano Beach. Max depth on the dive was 74ft and we had a good bottom time of about 25 minutes per diver. The water was a balmy 84 degrees Faranheit. We had a siting of the resident Goliath Grouper who skulked off as soon as he/she heard us coming, and had a great dive among the jumble of concrete culverts and the actual wreck of the Sea Emperor itself. One notable wildlife siting was the abundance of yellow/orange cup corals on the underside of the wreck. (This coral is one of the few that does not depend on photosynthetic zooxanthellae in its flesh for food and must capture all of its food from the water column.)
The only negative to the dive was the northerly current which was ripping. Divers commented that they hadn’t been in a current moving that fast since they last visited the island of Cozumel. Of course, Cozumel is known for its drift diving, and we were excited that the second dive was a drift dive on Whale’s Tail Reef.
This reef has an astonishing abundance of huge barrel sponges. They are literally everywhere on the reef top, and many showed where they had been snacked on by turtles. Speaking of turtles, Mark, Martin and Andre reported seeing a large turtle. Our photographer for the day, Ken Gioeli also found a lobster which taunted him. One more month, Ken declared, and he’s in my bag!
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