Cozumel | The Casual Blog

December 31, 2019

Our dive trip to Cozumel, and a word on behalf of science

French angelfish

For Christmas, Sally put together a scuba diving trip to Cozumel, Mexico with our dear ones — Gabe, Jocelyn, and Kyle (our new son-in-law). Our travel went smoothly, the weather was warm and pleasant, and the diving was revealing.

We stayed at the Hotel Cozumel and Resort, which has a large swimming pool surrounded by palm trees, as well as a small sandy area near the boat dock. For non-diving afternoons, we lounged about, read, and enjoyed pina coladas. Jocelyn, serving as our dinner concierge, found us some outstanding restaurants, including Kinta, Kondesa, and Alfredo di Roma Trattoria, and we had some good conversations with good laughs.

But the main event for four days was the diving. Each morning, we took boat rides of an hour or so along the coast to the south and did two dives of about an hour each. Our depths were mostly between 40 and 80 feet, with visibility from about 60 to 70 feet. The current was strong at times, and good for drift diving. Water temperatures at bottom were a pleasant 81 or 82 degrees Fahrenheit.

Gray angelfish

Even in our small area, there was a lot of variation in the marine life. Some of the coral seemed healthy and colorful, and other parts were brown and mossy, or bleached. There were a lot of small tropical fish with vibrant colors. Among the most enjoyable tropicals: angelfish (queen, French, and gray), butterflyfish (four-eye, banded), blue tangs, surgeonfish, durgons, trumpetfish, queen triggerfish, honecomb cowfish, balloonfish, porcupinefish, smooth trunkfish, whitespotted filefish, stoplight parrotfish, yellowtail snappers, and French grunts. We also saw a few barricudas, a few green moray eels, a few spotted morays, a few yellow stringrays, two magnificent spotted eagle rays, and one southern stingray.

We had no turtles until the last day, and then saw four Hawksbills on one dive (which was also the one dive when my camera malfunctioned). We were hoping to see nurse and reef sharks, as we have on previous trips here, but never did.

Gabe gives a thumbs up

I’m sure being a reef fish is tough at times, but in our reef visits most of the residents seemed at ease. Some were clearly aware of us, and while some were shy, others were curious. Spending time close to them was both thrilling and wonderfully calming. Looking hard at the animals and trying to understand them better gives new perspectives on ourselves.

French grunts

Of course we’re worried about the future of the Cozumel coral reef ecosystem, as many coral reefs around the world are dying. According to the IPCC, between 70 and 90 percent of coral reefs will perish by 2052 if global warming continues at present levels. This would have a devastating impact on all ocean life, not to mention human life that depends on ocean life.

Queen angelfish

But nature is amazingly resilient, and it’s certainly possible that we’ll figure out a way to stop killing coral reefs and other ecosystems. It will take some work, though, since we’ve barely begun to understand the workings of reef systems. More research is needed.

This is yet another reason why we need to boot Trump: Trump’s war on science. As the NY Times reported last week, Trumpians are shutting down federally supported science programs left and right, and threatening scientists who call attention to climate change and other health risks. Scientists with specialized and essential knowledge are getting let go or quitting government service, leaving us less and less able to address our emergencies. This is perverse!

Porcupinefish

A part of the explanation is probably the drive for more profits by fossil fuel, mining, agribusiness, and other corporate interests. Preventing greater understanding and control of the damage they’re doing to the planet is certainly in their self interest. But at the same time, corporate interests need scientific knowledge to manage risks, and the oligarchs have to live on the same planet as the rest of us. There must be more to it.

Very possibly Trump’s war on science is driven by the same malign impulses as has his war on the mainstream media. Both science and the media increase knowledge and understanding, which is at cross purposes with Trumpism. Science and serious media tend to undermine the administration’s preference for hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and ignorance. They give a basis for sensible political action, while their absence leaves an information vacuum that causes mass confusion and promotes political apathy.

Jocelyn and Kyle say hi

There are all kinds of problems inherent in science — unacknowledged bias, methodological errors, and even occasional intentional fraud. Individual scientists are as subject to intellectual and moral failings as the rest of us. However, the community of scientists is built for self-correction, so that errors by some scientists are often called out by other scientists. The background methods of science have been amazingly successful over the last four centuries in increasing knowledge about the natural world and increasing human well being.

Queen triggerfish

Science as a system isn’t perfect, but it’s the best way we’ve come up with so far for understanding the world and addressing its problems. It’s just bizarre that the richest, most technologically advanced country in history would systematically try to squelch it. Even leaving aside every other Trump criminality, cruelty, and stupidity, Trump’s war on science is reason enough to vote him out.

Sally says bye

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January 2, 2017

Ringing out the old year with a diving trip to Cozumel

We flew back from Cozumel on New Year’s eve, which was a good excuse for doing what we usually do at the end of the calendar year: nothing special. We changed planes in Charlotte, but didn’t have time to get food there, so after we unpacked, I walked over to get bean burritos at Armadillo Grill. Glenwood Avenue was hopping with lots of young people going to the bars and clubs, all dressed up and ready to party! Lots of happy energy.

So we begin another calendar year, with a clean slate, sort of. I began my Sunday as I usually do, with breakfast, coffee, and the big ole Sunday New York Times. I read an affecting piece on the lives of several New Yorkers over age 85. They had their problems, but most were still hopeful about the future. One noted that as farmers choose to cultivate different crops, we can choose what to cultivate in ourselves, like appreciation of science, art, and nature.

We had a great time scuba diving in Cozumel on the coral reefs. There are still so many beautiful and amazing living things there. Highlights for me included seeing 7 octopuses on a single night dive), a nurse shark sleeping with a giant green moray eel (didn’t know they did that), a moray eating a lionfish (offered by the divemaster), a big goliath grouper, a bat fish, numerous Hawksbill turtles, and several spotted eagle rays. And of course the many varied tropical fish. Seeing a queen angel fish always makes me happy.

I made my 286th dive, with Sally’s tally not far behind. Jocelyn and Gabe are still fairly new divers, but you wouldn’t have known it. They looked relaxed and in control, and were finding some hard-to-spot creatures, including splendid toadfish, scorpion fish, and arrow crabs.

Our days were mostly sunny and mild, with some clouds. We stayed at Hotel Cozumel, which was great for our purposes, with had adequate rooms and a staff that was friendly and responsive. In the afternoons it was pleasant to sip a pina colada and read by the pool. We went out every morning with Dive Paradise, which has a shop on the hotel premises. Their boats and equipment were just fine, and we adored Santos and Victor as divemasters. Boat rides were mostly about 30 minutes. We did drift diving, at times in strong currents, which made photography challenging. The water was a pleasant 81 degrees F, and visibility was generally good (50-70 feet).

Jocelyn took the lead in arranging our dinners. We particularly liked Kinta and Kondesa, with contemporary Mexican cuisine, and met the warmest, sweetest waiter in the world, Ray, at El Moro. We had a long and frustrating wait for a table at Casa Mission — no one would acknowledge our presence for 40 minutes — though we enjoyed the food. We liked the Italian food and margaritas at Rinaldi, and Le Chef, another Italian place, was also good. We had good talks, and also good cab rides. I was happy to hear the family speaking some Spanish, and to do a bit myself.

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January 4, 2015

Our holiday in Cozumel: diving, eating, and reading

Gabe and Jocelyn joined us in Raleigh for Christmas for the first time in several years. We ate and drank well and had some good laughs. Gabe had given himself a Canon G15 camera, which he’ll be using to get scenic pictures of Telluride for his company’s website and other publicity. It was fun talking photography, and he was taking amazingly good pictures. I was struck and a bit envious of his natural talent.

Last year I offered scholarships to both Gabe and Jocelyn to get their scuba certification, with the kicker that graduates would also get a holiday trip with us to a dive resort. Gabe couldn’t work out the logistics, but Jocelyn found a dive shop in New York and took the course. Last weekend she, Sally, and I sadly said good-bye to Gabe, and gladly went to Cozumel, Mexico.

We stayed at the Cozumel Hotel and Resort, and went diving with Dive Paradise. The good points of the hotel were: friendly service, large pool, beach (small), walking distance to town, good breakfasts, and dive shop and dock directly across the street. Dive Paradise was a large operation with several boats, but the service was personalized and friendly. Our boats were not overcrowded and the divemasters were knowledgeable and helpful.

We did two morning dives each day. The boat trips were between 30 minutes and about an hour. Particularly good spots were: Palancar Bricks, Cedral, San Francisco, Tunich, and Delilah. Visibility was generally 60-70 feet, water temperature 81 degrees F. The current was strong in places; think Lost in Space or Gravity. Every outing was a drift dive. We were usually down for 50-60 minutes.

Jocelyn spent the first two days finishing her Padi course by doing 4 open water dives , then joined us on the rest of our expeditions. She had no problem with the deeper dives (around 90 feet) or the places with strong current. She handled herself well, and I was a proud papa.

We saw a great deal of sea life, most of it familiar to Sally and me. Particularly thrilling were a pair of spotted eagle rays, an enormous (beastly huge!) green moray eel, large lobsters, and several hawksbill turtles. There were many beautiful angelfish and queen triggerfish. We saw a few nurse sharks and barracuda. Sally saw a pair of squid, and quite a few tiny things for which she needed her magnifying glass. The coral in places was highly varied and gorgeous.

I took photographs with my new Ikelite housing and strobes for my Nikon D7100. The equipment was heavy and bulky, and difficult to transport, but I was pleased with the way it performed under water. One of my objectives was to get a good picture of a queen angelfish, which are challenging both because of their normally shy natures and their wild colors. I was fairly happy with the ones here.

We ate a lot of tasty Mexican food, including outstanding and creative meals at Kinto and Condesa. We also had Italian food one night at La Terraza, which we thought was good.

In the afternoons we sat by the pool and read. I made substantial progress on The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow. I read and loved this novel in my early twenties, but it seemed new upon re-reading. It’s exuberant and Whitmanesque, exhilarating, but also challenging, resistant to skimming.

I also got a good start on The Innovators, by Water Isaacson. This is basically a history of computers and computing that gives mini-biographies of leading actors but also emphasizes that innovation is primarily a product of collaboration, rather than lone geniuses. Isaacson’s writing is competent and engaging.

One other book worth mentioning is The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business, by Christopher Leonard. It is an eye-opening account of the corporatization of the production of chicken, pork and beef, with a particular emphasis on chicken and Tyson Foods. There is nary a word about the horrific treatment of animals, but the story is still brutal from the point of view of the farmers and workers.

The farmers here were by degrees deprived of bargaining power, to the point that they stay in business only by the grace of Tyson or its few similarly enormous competitors. It’s also startling to learn about the extent to which government provided financial guarantees that allocated the risks to the taxpayers (that is, us) and farmers, but gave the big rewards to the food megacorps. This story deserves wider publicity. Another good reason to go veggie.

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May 13, 2013

Our dive trip to Cozumel

Sally and I just got back from a week of scuba diving in Cozumel, Mexico. As a friend recently noted, we like adventure vacations. If you do, too, you would probably like Cozumel. The diving was great, and the above-water scene was lively, too.

Cozumel is a warm and enterprising place. Most of the real beauty, for me, is in the reefs, but I also really liked the people. The Mexicans I met are mostly cheerful and good humored, but also polite and dignified. They worked hard to help us along our way.

The business of Cozumel is tourism, and there are many layers to this business, from high end hotels to street hawkers. A stroll through the main part of town takes you past many gold and silver jewelry shops, clothing shops, crafts establishments, restaurants, and shops selling Cuban cigars. Most of these shops have a person who will try to persuade you to look inside, some of whom are aggressive and insistent. It’s a bit annoying if you’re not interested in the goods, but the beautiful blue water fronting the main street makes up for any inconvenience.

I’d been planning to use more of my Spanish, which is still a work in progress, but had little occasion to. The sales and service people of Cozumel have highly developed antennae for spotting los norteamericanos, and encourage expenditures by using English, which ranged from adequate to impressive. A couple of waiters gently corrected my usage mistakes, which I appreciated, and I think they appreciated my making some effort with their language, but it was clearly not required.

Our hotel was the Casa Mexicana, a mod-looking place on the water in the center of town. Our rooms was attractive and comfortable, with a balcony overlooking the courtyard restaurant where we ate very satisfying breakfasts. The lobby was on the second floor with a pool and deck chairs overlooking the water. Lots of restaurants were within walking distance, though we took a taxi to our favorite, Casa Mission. The hotel was only a few steps from the shop of the folks who took us diving, Aqua Safari, and the boat dock was just across the street.

Our boats usually had about fifteen divers. These included our group of six organized by our friend Dan out of Down Under Surf and Scuba. We did two dives in the morning, and after returning to the dock, we either ate quickly and went out for an afternoon dive, or on two days relaxed and then went out again at 7:00 for a night dive. The boat rides to the dive sites were generally one to 1.5 hours. Our guides were experienced, and showed us many interesting places and creatures. Early May seemed a good time to be there – sunny, breezy, and not un-Godly hot.

Our dive environments fell into three main groups: coral walls that went much deeper than we could dive, coral patches separated by sandy areas, and large coral structures shaped like pillars, boulders, mesas, and canyons, which made me think of southwest Utah. There were dozens of species of live coral. Some were vivid colors (purple, orange, green, yellow, red), and we also saw the famous black coral. Their shapes and textures were fantastically varied, including ones that looked like cactuses, pillars, antlers, brains, and various vegetables.

Cozumel is famous for drift diving, meaning a trip that goes where the strong current takes you. This can be exhilarating, but is also challenging at times. In the strongest current, there is no easy way to stop or reverse course, and it can feel by moments like Lost in Space. This requires alertness to avoid collisions with people or coral, and limits the chances to take photographs or look at things with deliberation. There were dive sites with little current, though, which were calm and sweet.

And of course, there were thousands of fish and other creatures. We’ve been trying to improve our identification skills, with the useful reference works on reef fish, creatures, and coral by Paul Humann and Ned Deloach. Sally was prepared to ID a green sea turtle, of which we saw only one, though we saw several hawksbills. She also introduced me to the whitenosed pipefish and various seahorses.

There was no shortage of bizarre looking creatures, including the porcupine fish, splendid toadfish, flying gurnard, smooth trunkfish, trumpetfish, honeycomb cowish, scrawled firefish, and queen triggerfish. We saw southern stingrays, as well as yellow rays and a Caribbean torpedo ray, and spotted and green moray eels. There were also large spiny lobsters and crabs. On a night dive I saw two octopuses that transformed themselves into objects of varying shapes and colors. It was fantastic!

One species we we pleased not to see many of was the lion fish. These invasive predators reproduce quickly, have no resident enemies, and consume voraciously. They’re now common in the northern Caribbean. Our main guide, Miguel, said that the dive guides in Cozumel had been authorized to kill them, and the numbers have been substantially reduced in the most dived areas of the south coast over the lat three years.

We also saw some big and medium creatures: nurse sharks, black groupers, barracuda, giant parrotfish, jacks, grunts, and snappers. I particularly adore the queen angelfish, and saw many, as well as French and gray angelfish. And there were untold numbers of colorful smaller tropicals – durgons, tangs, grunts, surgeon fish, butterflyfish, chromis, wrasse, and many others. The profusion of life is amazing, still!

My camera strobe worked fine on day one and two, but then the supporting arm’s joint broke, and so my photographs after that were mostly by natural life. This was disappointing, because there are things that just can’t be captured without a strobe, but I liked some of the images I got. The pictures here are all mine, except the first, the one immediatelhy above, and the ones below of Sally and me, which were taken by Pete, a professional. (Yes, I realize his look a lot better than mine. My excuse is he had better equipment, though also probably more talent.)

The morning before our flight home, we rented a jet ski and sported about for a half hour. The machine, a Yamaha, seemed very powerful. The water was choppy, and I never quite managed to take the machine to full throttle, as it jumped and bucked. Sally rode behind me, and proclaimed herself thoroughly shaken and glad to still be alive when we were done. But note, she never complained or requested that we slow down. That’s my gal!

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April 28, 2013

Helping bluebirds, and some good and not-so-good internet experiences

Since 2004, Sally has tended a group of bluebird houses in Cary on the Lochmere golf course, near where we used to live. She keeps fourteen houses in good working order and keeps track of the numbers of eggs and numbers of hatchlings, then passes the data along to the North Carolina Bluebird Society. Bluebird rely on human-built boxes for breeding spaces, and Sally likes helping them. It’s the breeding season, and this week she invited me to come along after work to see the activity.

She already had secured a golf cart when I arrived. It was a sunny, mild afternoon, and there were plenty of golfers out on the course. She started with hole number 1, where Sally opened the door, pulled out the nest of pine straw, and found several dark gray nestlings, which snuggled together quietly. Their mama was not at home, but at the next house, the mama bird shot out as we got close to the house and nearly hit my face.

At the third house there were both bluebird and chickadee eggs. We saw several others populated by hatchlings and eggs that must have been close to hatching. In one, where there had been eggs the week before, there were none. Sally said a snake had probably got them. It seemed sad, though not, I guess, for the snake. Anyhow it was most pleasant to see the birds and birds-to-be with my dear one, and learn more about their lives.

We have tickets for a trip to Cozumel next week for several days of scuba diving, and this week we met with our group at Down Under Surf and Scuba to get briefed on drift diving and other procedures. Back home, we began our preparations — checking over the gear, refreshing on protocols, and paging through our sea creature identification books. My underwater strobe wasn’t working properly, so I’ll need to get that over to the dive shop for a consult.

Cozumel is English-language friendly, but even so I’ve been inspired to try to advance my Spanish. In addition to Rosetta Stone, I’ve been working on verb conjugation at a very helpful web site that generates drills for every tense. I’ve been focusing on the preterite and the imperfect, and improving.

I’ve also been sampling lessons at Livemocha. This service invites native speakers of one language, like Spanish, to help those interested in learning their language, like me, and they may also get help in another language, like English, from someone like me. I’ve gotten useful written feedback from folks in Columbia and Mexico, and have tried to give others some helpful tips on English.

The idea of the internet connecting language students is exciting. At the same time, it’s a little unsettling. Livemocha allows for “friending” requests, and I’ve gotten a few of these, but so far I haven’t accepted. I’m not quite clear on what the responsibilities, and risks, might be. I’m more or less constantly overcommitted already, and I would be sorry to disappoint my as yet unknown “friends” in, say, Columbia. And I would be particularly sorry if they turned out to be violent sociopaths of some sort.

Speaking of internet risks, I had an odd experience this week. I finished The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity, by Bruce Hood, which I’d purchased from Amazon in the Kindle edition to read on my tablet device. The next day, I got an email from Amazon asking me how I liked The Self Illusion. !!! I hadn’t realized that Amazon had invited itself quite so intimately into my reading life. Of course, I didn’t read whatever they required me to click on (does anybody?), so it’s possible that I in some hyper legal sense agreed to let them monitor my reading. But really! That’s just icky!

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