Half Moon Cay, Lighthouse Reef

We dove the Blue Hole yesterday morning. There are a number of 'fast dive boats' that come over from Ambergris (about 30-40 miles) for the day. They all arrived at the Blue Hole about 9:30... there were about 30 divers in the water at one time, all in one spot. We waited for them all to leave and then took the dinghy over. We didn't see any mooring balls so anchored outside the reef surrounding the Blue Hole and then squirmed our way carefully thru the reef to go down. When we got inside the hole area, we did see at least one floating line that was a mooring (no ball on it though).

We descended quickly straight down into the black hole. There were big black grouper hanging around the rim (probably well fed by the dive boats). At about 70' we saw several reef sharks circling the rim. We continued down to where the edge receeds under the rim--supposed to be caves and stalactites, at about 120'. I took a few pictures with the camera, but am still struggling to figure out how to make it all work together. It's a relatively new camera, the manual is terrible, with an external strobe with no manual, and I haven't used it in a year.


Between the depth, the darkness, and the sharks, we didn't stay long. But we did dive the Blue Hole.

After lunch we moved back south to Half Moon Cay (about 6 miles), picking our way through the coral heads in about 7-8'. We stopped at a nice looking coral head for a snorkel, but found it to be cleaned out by the 'reef raper' boats... piles of cleaned conch everywhere. We moved to another one and still didn't find any lobster, but got enough conch for dinner (conch salad and cracked conch).

We hope to make a dive here today, if the weather's not too bad. The Half Moon Cay dive sites are on the south side, exposed, and so you need pretty settled weather to dive them. Dave keeps telling me that this is one of the top 3 dive site in the entire Caribbean. I can't wait.