Aquaba Adventures

What are some of the advantages to being blond in a Middle Eastern country? Most recently, the advantage was driving our dive boat. A group of seven of us travelled to Aquaba, Jordan two weeks ago for a weekend diving trip that Alex had planned. Every day we walked next door to the dive shop, gathered our gear, and drove out to the "Royal Yacht Marina." Wow! What a beautiful black and with gold edging yacht that we are walking up to. Oh, that's the King's boat not ours. Keep walking past it to the one a few boats down. Oh, a rowboat...th-th-that one is nice too. Just joking. Here is the bridge on the upper deck where I got to drive. Good thing it was all the way from the Saudi border to the port because it took me a bit to figure out how to go straight. The delayed reaction to the wheel had me veering in a zigzag pattern until he covered the compass and I focused on a far away object and just headed straight for it.

Every day we did two dives with lunch and relaxing in between. This is Jody and AnnMarie on the upper deck of our boat. The underwater sights included reefs and wrecks. The wreck was the most fun because we could dive in, under, and around it. Cables, decorated with bright coral and seaweed, were strung like Christmas lights up to the ship's highest tower. It no longer proudly rose over the ship's deck but jutted out into the "deep blue" running parallel to the ocean floor which quickly dropped out of sight below it. As we swam between the mast and it's cables, we saw a slender, solitary fish, about a meter long, suspended above the wreck. It's lower jaw jutted out, and if you swam closer than was comfortable, you could see his uneven fangs jutting out. The barracuda just hung there, overlooking his surroundings. We gave him a wide berth and continued exploring.

On the dive that was the most fun, we swam down to a flat surface on the ship and let all the air out of our BCD vests so that we could stand flat on the metal floor. After removing our flippers, and hanging onto them for dear life so that they don't float away, we were able to experience the weightless, moon-walking sensation. Leaping, flipping, toe-touches - all are performed with an extra height and slow motion grace not possible on gravity-bound earth. We used up much of our air laughing at each other's antics.

Here, the crew is pulling in a tuna that they caught on a trailing line. They caught a pretty big one and had plans to fry it up later that night. Too bad we were headed back to Israel!