Hey guys, I need your help. I’ve entered the 2012 Best Dive Job Competition. In order to win I need you, my beloved readers, to comment on my entry post found here: Mike Lenzen – Best Dive Job in the World 2012.
Here’s the catch, the competition closes on February 28th, so there’s not much time left.
Thanks so much for your help, feel free to spread this around facebook, twitter, google+, email, telephone, or whatever you’ve got. It’s all appreciated.
Comments (2) We’ve been going on and on about how we decided to become divemasters in Utila, but it’s come to my attention that most people outside of the diving world don’t really know what a divemaster does. So let’s change that, shall we?
We, as divemasters, can not teach you, our lovely friends and family, how to scuba dive. We would have to become instructors for that, another course that comes with a hefty price tag.
What we can do is lead certified divers. That means that once you get your open water certification, we can take you out, let you know what to expect on the dive, point out some interesting aquatic life, and get you back to the boat with plenty of air to spare. That’s what divemasters are for… they take the stress of navigating out of the equation and they know where to look to see the cool stuff. A good divemaster makes the dives smoother and more enjoyable for everyone.
Divemasters can do a few more things too. They can refresh your diving skills if you haven’t dove in a while. They can certify skin divers (snorkelers). They can also teach a few specialities, given the appropriate additional certifications and take out discover scuba divers (someone that is not certified) after an instructor has taken them out at least once before.
There are several stages of training between landlubber and PADI divemaster.
First, you need your open water diver certification. In Utila, this is typically a three day course. The first day is spent in confined water (a pool or off-dock pool-like environment) learning the skills, and then four open water dives are done over two days from the boat. There are five knowledge reviews and a final exam to complete. Once certified, you can dive with a buddy to a depth of 18 m.
Then, you need your advanced open water certification. This course is much less rigid than the open water course. You need to complete five adventure dives, typically over 2-3 days. These dives must include a deep dive (between 18 and 30 m) and a navigation dive. The other three are up to you! We chose to do a wreck dive, night dive, and peak performance buoyancy. There are five knowledge reviews to complete, but no final exam. Once certified, you can dive with a buddy to a depth of 30 m.
The last step before the divemaster program is to become a rescue diver. Before you can become a rescue diver, you need to have a valid EFR certification (emergency first response/CPR and first aid), taken within the past 24 months. If you don’t already have it, it will be an extra afternoon of instruction and practice, a couple of knowledge reviews, and an exam. The rescue course typically takes about three days and involves a lengthy confined water section and then two scenarios and a dive from hell off the boat. You learn how to deal with all kinds of problems and emergencies in and out of the water, including how to respond to panicked, tired, and unresponsive divers underwater and at the surface.
Finally, the divemaster program. To begin the program, you need to have 40 logged dives under your belt (all of the previous course dives count as logged dives). If you don’t have 40 dives, don’t worry… in Utila, you don’t have to pay for them once you’ve signed up for the divemaster program. The actual course can take anywhere from two and a half to eight weeks, depending on your schedule. The course includes: nine knowledge reviews, a final exam, a skills circuit assessment (of your ability to demonstrate the open water skills), a swimming skills assessment (400 m timed swim, 800 m timed snorkel, 100 m timed tired diver tow, 15 float/tread), an underwater equipment exchange, dive site mapping project, deep dive scenario, search & recovery scenario, dive briefing assessment, dive site & boat set up assessment, five workshops where instructors, divemasters, and DMTs act as your divers (discover local diving, skin diving, discover scuba diving confined water, discover scuba diving additional dive, and scuba tune-up), and four actual scenarios (assist on confined dives for open water course, assist on open water dives of open water course, assist on a continuing education course, and lead certified divers). You also need a total of 60 logged dives to finish the program (this is no problem by the time you’ve met all the other requirements).
Choosing a dive shop is always an important factor for any certification, but because of the time involved it is especially important with the divemaster program. One of the instructors at the shop will be your personal mentor. Depending on the set up, they may also be the person you do all of your skills with during the course (we got the opportunity to work with several instructors while completing our divemaster program, which I would highly recommend).
The best way to choose a dive shop in a place like Utila (which has something like 14 different shops) is to spend a day walking around and talking to them all. Obviously, you need to ask the cost of the program (remember, these are often negotiable, especially if it’s low season). Also find out if the cost includes any extras… Are the dives required to start the program included? Does this include reef fees?
Related to the question of price – what are the perks? Do you offer free/discounted accommodation? If so, for how long? Do you offer any free/discounted specialty courses to divemasters-in-training? We managed to get our nitrox, wreck, and deep specialties for the cost of the certification. Do you get free diving for life after you’re done the course?
Also, if you’re planning to stick around and work as a divemaster, ask about the possibility of continuing on with the shop – some shops guarantee work for their graduates (though the amount of work might be sparse). If you’re interested in making a few bucks back, ask if you can work in the shop while you’re completing your course.
Probably the most important factor in choosing a dive shop is the people. The prices are usually pretty close from shop to shop and you can walk around checking out equipment, but it’ll probably be similar as well. When you chat with the shops about prices and get tours of the facility, note the vibe of the place… is it a party place? Is it quiet and laidback? Does everyone seem to get along well? Are there experienced instructors around for everyone to benefit from? Is there an instructor that you can have a good mentor/mentee relationship with? Do you get to choose your mentor or will they be assigned to you? Can you set your own schedule, or do you need to follow theirs? If at all possible, make sure you get out on the dive boat at least once before committing to any shop.
Painted DMTs... a seriously great group of people
Ultimately, we didn’t choose the cheapest shop (I know, I know… how out of character for us), we chose to pay a little more for a shop that fit our schedule, and our vibe. All in all, the time we spent picking our shop was well worth the effort.
That’s it. Three months after arriving in Utila, it’s time to say goodbye. It’s bittersweet in a way, this is the only time so far in our trip where we’ve had to move on. We are scheduled to meet Ashley’s mom and her mom’s boyfriend in Nicaragua. A plan that was hatched just before we decided to take a trip on the vomit comet… before scuba diving.
But that’s life… if you work, you probably need to book your holidays, and Ashley’s mom was no exception. “Where are you going to be in February?” she asked.
“We have no idea,” was our response, “Does Nicaragua sound good to you?”
“That could work.” And so, we agreed to meet in Nicaragua.
Don’t get us wrong, we are plenty excited to see Ashley’s mom. Overwhelmingly so, in fact… how could we not be? It’s been a whopping seven months since we last saw her, along with everyone else from home. It’s just that saying goodbye can be tough. Leaving Utila is almost as tough as it was to leave home. We know and have become attached to so many wonderful people.
Now three months in, we’ve completed the PADI divemaster program. The typical course of action is to invite everyone out to what’s called a snorkel test. The snorkel test is exactly what you are imagining. You sit perched in front of all your friends at the front of a bar while your mentor pours a copious amount of booze into a funnel attached to the top of your snorkel. You sit there and drink until you can’t drink anymore, then you wretch. There’s usually some applauding, followed by some dancing, and occasionally a medical emergency requiring minor first aid.
We’re too damn old for that nonsense. We’ve become quite tame, living on our little Jewel Cay. We needed a more fitting way to say goodbye, something that suited us a bit better. Where someone that had spent the past 3 months living in the grand metropolis of Utila may have found a visit to Jewel Cay calming and relaxing, that wasn’t an option for us. We needed something else, something smaller, something like… a private island!
Little Cay is a private island for rent. It’s a bit pricey, costing $150 USD a night for up to 6 people, and an additional $10 USD per person after that. I’m not sure what the total capacity is, but I would hazard to guess that it would sleep around 15 if need be.
The house is really really nice. There’s a huge kitchen and common area. Two fridges – one for drinks, the other for food. An electric generator and solar powered lights. The rooms are spacious with their own bathrooms, and there’s even a guest house. The island is covered in soft sand, coconut palms, and hermit crabs.
Anything you want. That’s the beauty of it. There’s no one there to tell you no, or give you funny looks. For us, an island full of divemasters, divemasters in training and instructors, we chose to go on a shore dive. It was fun getting out to a new site that we hadn’t seen before. We made the most of it, staying under for about an hour, and saw some critters that are a little bit more rare, like a Spanish Lobster. It was nice, but not the most spectacular diving we’ve seen.
After the dive, it was time for food. We had tuna (purchased filleted on Jewel Cay for about $1.50USD per pound), bread fruit, salad, potato salad, ham and cheese buns, cinnamon buns, and some coconuts to hold our rum.
After the meal things died down considerably, we drank a bit more, and eventually nodded off to sleep. Great time, great food, just the right amount of sleep. Our kind of going away party. We are going to miss you Utila. So much so, that I wouldn’t be surprised if we crossed paths again sooner rather than later.
Jewel Cay and Pigeon Cay are located just off the southwest corner of Utila island, about 20 minutes by boat from the town of Utila. The two islands are pleasantly small. In fact, one of their greatest draws is their tiny size and the utter lack of motored vehicles. That’s right, there are no motor vehicles on these islands. There is but a single sidewalk connected by a concrete bridge that spans the distance from one end of Jewel Cay all the way across to the far end of Pigeon Cay. As expected, with a single road no more than 420 meters long, finding your way around doesn’t take long – you can walk the whole length of the place in about 6 minutes.
Don’t let the size of the islands fool you though, they are capable of supporting a lot more than you would think. First off, consider the people. These tiny islands boast a population of 500 people (I take this number with a grain of salt, and still consider it a bit of an exaggerated boast). These same 500 people are almost entirely bilingual, speaking their original tongue of English and their second language Spanish. Nope, you read correctly, English is their first language… not Spanish. If you go back far enough in history, it turns out that the Bay Islands were inhabited by the English right up until the mid 19th century. To this day, about five of the original colonizing families occupy the majority of the property on the island and have heavily influenced the culture, making it remarkably different from that of mainland Honduras.
Beyond the people, these islands support seven stores, seven churches, three restaurants, three hotels, a hardware store, a barber, a place to get your laundry done, and plenty of fishermen. We met one store owner who had not left the Cays in over 10 years since there’s so much there! One notable exception is the lack of an ATM machine. If you need cash, you’ll either have to work, beg, or go back to Utila to use the ATM machine.
Of the seven churches, the most famous is arguably “Karaoke Church”. That’s not it’s actual name, but that’s what we liked to call it. They hold service at least twice a week, on Thursdays and Sundays. To earn their name, they set up a keyboard, drum set, loudspeakers, and a microphone. During service they each take a turn at the microphone with the volume cranked as loud as it goes, completely drowning out the rest of the congregation. The result sounded exactly like really bad karaoke.
You may be thinking that 7 stores is way too much for such a little island, and you are probably right. However they each seem to sell out of all of their wares on a weekly basis. The supply boat brings in fresh groceries on Tuesdays around 6:00pm. For the next hour, the whole town goes out to do their week’s worth of shopping, after which the selection of fruits and vegetables dwindles considerably. The first things to go are the avocados, followed by broccoli, cauliflower, and lettuce. By Sunday, they would also be out of cheese and meat. If there were any vegetables remaining, their prices would remarkably rise up 50% over and above the levels found on the previous Tuesday. Even though we had our favourite stores, trying to piece together enough to make a meal would often require us to shop at all seven, spreading out our business. So in a way, the seven stores have learned how to share the business between them.
Another important aspect of the Cays were the baked goods. In short, they were cheap and fantastically delicious. Some of my favourites were cinnamon buns, on Cinnamon Bun Monday (a brilliant marketing strategy that ensured a complete sell out by about 7:30 AM every week), homemade doughnuts (Tuesdays, Thursdays, and sometimes Saturdays), hot coconut bread, banana tarts, ginger bread, coconut candy, and banana cake. You could find baked goods everywhere including the Captain Morgan’s Hotel, Miss Diana’s house, and most of the grocery stores. The most expensive of these were 10 Lempiras, about $0.50USD, with the cheapest costing half that. By the end, I was eating baked goods 3-4 times each day, and getting fat because of it…
If you weren’t into baked goods, there was also Pizza Night on Thursdays, where Miss Diana would make pizzas in her house. One pizza was enough to feed two, and they were delicious. Without a doubt, Pizza Night was our favourite night on the Cays. Aside from pizza, there were a good selection of drinks at Myra’s (one of the three restaurants) including natural fruit juices, and my favourite – frozen coconut milk – a deliciously cool ice-cream-like treat for only 5 lempiras or $0.25USD.
Diving. At least that’s what we liked to do when we were not eating baked goods or pizza. If you are not into diving though, there is also good snorkelling, with equipment for rent from the Captain Morgan’s Dive Shop. If you want to keep your head out of the water, there are kayaks for rent from Cay View restaurant costing 100 Lempiras for a single, and 150 Lempiras for a double for the day.
As a day trip you could head over to the beautiful Water Cay, accessible by kayak or chartered boat.
If you are looking for a bit of novelty, there are also 2 private islands for rent, both of which you can spend the night on (more details about this coming soon).
Your best bet is to talk to the staff at Captain Morgan’s Dive Shop, just up from the ferry dock in Utila. Their dive boat leaves Utila headed for Jewel Cay daily at 6:50AM. Another option is to catch a ride with Mr. Donald. He lands his boat “Donna Ray” most days (but never on Saturdays) at the same dock that Captain Morgan’s uses, and usually departs by 11:00AM. Aside from that, it’s also possible to charter your own boat, leaving on your schedule, for about 700 Lempiras ($35USD).
These little islands were home for 3 months. Now we are on the lookout for the next place to settle down. Any suggestions? The world is our oyster.
We thought we had already done the swimming with whale sharks thing. July. Isla Holbox, Mexico. $70 bucks a person. Two jumps in. Two minutes a jump. And we thought it was amazing!
But when whale sharks were spotted by dive boats around Utila, we started getting antsy. And when our dive boat started spotting them and taking divers to snorkel with them, and we weren’t on the boat (because there was no room for us), we started getting really antsy. Okay, maybe antsy doesn’t cut it. Bitter is a little more like it.
So when one of our friends, Bogdan, suggested we hire a boat and go out searching for them one afternoon, we were in. The boat captain, Alex, was his good friend of his, so we only had to pay the cost of gas… roughly $10/person.
Bogdan, Jutta (another good friend of ours from Austria), Mike, and I took off at about 3:00 in the afternoon, hoping to get lucky. Everyone on board knew that there were no guarantees, but we were all brimming with excitement. We went to the north side of Utila and, within minutes of searching, saw our first “boil.” I was so excited I nearly peed my pants.
A boil, if you are wondering, is how you spot the feeding whale sharks near the surface. The whale sharks are always accompanied by a swarm of other plankton feeders which attract the attention of larger predator fish like tuna. All this movement near the surface makes the water look like it is literally boiling. Birds are also attracted by the action and the easiest way to spot a boil from a distance is to watch for swooping birds.
We jumped in, swam a little ways and there it was… a magnificent, massive whale shark. This guy was about 6-7 m long and when I first spotted him he was vertical, head up, feeding on the plankton. In no time at all, he lowered his huge body and started swimming away.
When you watch videos of these guys, it looks like they are swimming nice and slow, but they’re not. Because of their size and power, these guys motor and you have to swim your heart out to try and keep up.
Video courtesy of our friend Bogdan of Duppy Waters Productions (this is one of the whale sharks we saw)
In Mexico, we swam along beside the head of the whale shark and couldn’t even see the tail when we turned back. This is not because of the animal’s size, it was because of the poor visibility. In Utila, the visibility was excellent in comparison, and we could see the entire whale shark from a good distance underwater.
Once the tail faded out of sight, we returned to the boat and pulled ourselves up into the skiff in what could only be described as an incredibly ungraceful manner (in fact, I was left with so many bruises from this that friends were wondering about spousal abuse). We flopped down happy and satisfied and immediately spotted two more boils. The rest of our afternoon followed the same pattern… spot a boil, chase it down with the boat, jump in, try and keep up, flop into the boat, repeat. All in all, we jumped in about ten times. Personally, I saw five whalesharks. Okay, I actually only saw one of two different whalesharks (one was 6-7 m long, the other 9-10 m) on five separate occasions. And I was elated!
Comparing my experience with those of my friends on the dive boat (including Jutta who had just been on the boat that morning when they spotted whale sharks), we had the perfect set up. Instead of twenty people fighting to get in the water, there were just four of us. No one jumped in on top of our heads. We knew what we were doing, so we slipped gently into the water instead of crashing in and scaring the whale shark away. We could also spread ourselves out so we saw more than just the bubbles of someone’s kicking fins in front of us.
On the boat ride back to our home on little Jewel Cay, we were treated with some spectacular views lit by the setting sun.
This whale shark experience totally blew our previous one out of the water (and, at a fraction of the cost, how can you go wrong?). The only words I could use to describe it when I got back was “f***ing brilliant” and I could not wipe the smile off my face for days.
If you ever get the chance to swim with these mammoth creatures, don’t think twice. Do it. The experience is magical and phenomenal and something you will never EVER forget.
If you would have told me seven months ago that I would become a divemaster on this journey, I would have laughed and called you crazy. I come from landlocked Saskatchewan. I didn’t even see the ocean until I was nineteen years old. And I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with water. I love to be in and around it, but have never been a strong swimmer. I tried taking my open water scuba diving certification back in Saskatchewan, and quit halfway through because I hated the cold, nearly zero visibility lake dives.
Nevertheless, I thought that since Utila, Honduras was the cheapest place in the world to get certified as a diver and since we were passing right by anyways, we should stop and try diving in the ocean at least once. Just to see what there is to see. After the certification and a few fun dives each, we would move on. Ha!
After only five minutes in the water, I was totally and completely in love. It turns out diving is a lot like travelling… if you take the time to get below the surface, there is a whole new world to explore. The closer you look at something, the more vibrant life you see. And snorkelling doesn’t even compare… even with short free dives, it seems very two-dimensional. Scuba adds the exciting third dimension to it all.
So I had to do something to keep diving. And the divemaster program was just that. In addition to improving your basic skills, developing your underwater navigation skills (finding the boat doesn’t seem like magic anymore), and increasing your overall comfort level in the water, the divemaster course had another huge draw… free diving for life! We signed up with only 13 dives under our belts, and haven’t had to pay for another since.
Ultimately, we are leaving Utila with 105 dives each (in case you’re wondering, we totally followed tradition for dive #100), 74 1/2 hours underwater, and the following certifications: open water diver, advanced open water diver, rescue diver, EFR (emergency first response), deep diver (allows you to go 40 m), wreck divers (allows you to penetrate wrecks), and nitrox (allows you to breathe enriched air with a higher oxygen content, increasing your maximum bottom time).
And all of this (courses, certifications, course materials, reef fees and everything else) cost us an average of $13/dive per person. Not too shabby, eh?
I have no doubt that we will return to Utila to dive with Captain Morgan’s Dive Centre again (with free diving, we’d be crazy not to). We’re just not sure when… near future or distant future?
I definitely know that, now that I’m Divemaster Ash, I want to keep diving. A lot. I may even start wearing a robe tied with a rope and saying things like “In order to dive, one must first enter the water” (okay, Josh, I totally stole your joke here). We won’t make a fortune as divemasters (at our shop they earn $2/hour in the shop and $2.50/diver per dive when they lead dives), but it’s one way to keep diving for cheap.
We still don’t know how becoming divemasters will fit into our future travel plans. Likely, we will spend more time on the coasts, in places where the diving is good. We may even stop somewhere and get jobs. Who knows… maybe we’ll even become instructors?
Do you know about the lionfish? Some might call the lionfish a beautiful fish. Some even go so far as to purchase lionfish to keep in their aquarium and show off to their friends and family. And maybe, at one time, that was a reasonable sort of thing to do. But not now, not here in Utila. Here we like our lionfish dead. That’s right… the only good lionfish is a dead lionfish.
Why? Because they are not supposed to be here. The lionfish are an invasive species to to the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean. They were introduced somewhere around the mid 1990’s on the Florida coast, and have been spreading like the plague ever since. Already their population levels are orders of magnitude greater than the levels found in their native habitat. That’s because here they have no natural predators and they breed like submersible rabbits. It’s estimated that at least 27% of the current population would have to be killed monthly just to maintain population levels. If you are trying to reduce their numbers, or better yet eliminate them entirely, you’re going to have to kill a lot of lionfish.
To make matters worse, aside from just being here, they are harming the local reef ecosystems. They have a habit of eating a lot, compromising the survival of native fish species. Over the long term the lionfish’s appetite could lead to an 80% reduction in reef diversity. That’s a lot of fish species that we won’t be able to see anymore. Bad lionfish.
Lionfish are delicious. They fry up really nice, they are good in stew, and make wonderful ceviche. It’s also a lot of fun to hunt them with spears. They are the only marine life you are allowed to hunt while diving, so they do add a whole new dynamic to diving that wouldn’t exist without them. For a lot of people, killing lionfish has become second nature, and it’s almost expected that you bring along a spear when fun diving. You can kill as many as you like, and there is no shortage of them either. Seeing 3 or 4 in a dive is almost routine.
Annually, the dive shops on Utila organize a lionfish derby and cookout to promote the new sport. In 2011, they managed to catch a little over 300 lionfish in a single day. All of them hit the grill and were eaten up by the hungry masses in mere minutes. And let me tell you, everything was delicious.
Lionfish Lunch
If you want to kill lionfish, help the environment, and get free lunch all at the same time, there’s a few things you can do. First, plan for a few days of fun diving. You can’t bring a spear along during any courses, so just plan on making a few extra dives just for fishing. If you don’t already have your advanced certification you might consider getting it. The advanced certification extends your depth limits from 18 metres down to 30 metres. Lionfish love the deeper water, so your odds of seeing some you can reach improves dramatically. Finally, ask about diving on the North Side of Utila. Lionfish numbers are substantially greater on the North Side, and your kill count will benefit from that.
Our first underwater video! A Lionfish Killing Compilation.
Mike and Ashley Lenzen are a married couple from Canada. They spent 21 consecutive months globe trotting between July 6th, 2011 and March 24th, 2013. After two months of touring their own country, they've set out again.
They are currently volunteering for 12 months in the country of Bhutan. Read More...
