Upon arrival to
Georgetown,
I boarded the tender to be taken into the harbor to begin my
Atlantis Deep Dive experience.
The brochure says "800 feet down", but for another $100, you can go the
full 1000 feet, and it was worth it.
The trip started out with a small powerboat ride to the location
of the submarine. We then crawled down a small hole to squeeze into
the sub. It had a 5-foot diameter curved glass front porthole, which
was just barely enough room for Mike and me to sit side by side and
still look out. The sub driver sat behind us with his head out the
upper port, and operated switches to his side to move the free-floating
sub.
The first part of the trip was a rapid descent to 1000 feet below,
made entirely in natural light, slowly backing up from the 55 degree
slope of the reef. The eerie blue light diminished, but never completely
disappeared. At 1000 feet, we turned to the right to see a completely
dark nothingness to which the driver pointed saying "that's the 5000
foot trench... if we started sinking, there'd be nothing to stop us
from going to the bottom". That's the first point at which I felt
like I was actually in danger. Wheee!
We then spent the next hour climbing back up slowly, just a mere
few feet from the wall, with the front lights lit so we could see.
It was incredible, and indescribable. I'll let the pictures speak
for themselves.
If you want to skip over the descent, you can
start directly at the ascent pictures.
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Tuesday - Georgetown and my deep-sea dive |
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021_-.jpg through 040_-.jpg |
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| 021_-.jpg |
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| 022_-_Not_much_headroom!.jpg |
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| 023_-_below_the_surface!.jpg |
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| 024_-.jpg |
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| 025_-_three_to_beam_down!.jpg |
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| 026_-_goin_down!.jpg |
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| 029_-_reef_going_down.jpg |
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| 032_-_side_view_-_slope_of_reef.jpg |
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| 040_-.jpg |
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