The underwater world at Utila

(PADI certified divers at Utila)

Shiu-Jene and I are now the proud owners of official PADI diving titles. Shiu-Jene is a certified Open Water Diver and I'm an Advanced Open Water Diver. Yeah!

We have been diving here at Utila for the last 5 days and it has just been amazing! Shiu-Jene has been doing classes, passing the written test for the Open Water Diver course and doing her dives, which included navigation under water, taking of and putting back on equipment under water and other skills.

I have been doing 5 dives, all speciality dives part of the Advanced Open Water Diver course: Deep dive, diving down to 30 meters; under water navigation, where we practices to find our way under water; Wreck dive, diving down to the Haliburton Wreck, and old ship that has been sunk 9 years ago and now lying on the bottom; PPB course, where we practices moving through the water to be a better diver; and last, Night Dive, diving at night when it's completely dark outside. All of it was amazing!

Today we did two fun dives together. Fun dives are dives without any classes or training; you just dive for fun (hence the name fun dives :-) )
On the way there we saw dolphins from the boat! Cool! And for the first time Shiu-Jene and I was diving together!

Now classes are over and we are staying another day on the Island, just to enjoy. After that we are moving on to Belize.

I should actually say a bit about the days before Utila. As you might now, we traveled down from Guatemala only to find ourselves in the middle of the Hurricane Wilma, which at one point was the most powerful hurricane ever, or something like that! We were planning on going directly out to Utila, but Wilma kept us at the mainland for 5 days. In those 5 days the following happened: we met two very funny danish girls - Helene and Majbritt - who we were hanging out with both in La Ceiba on the mainland and on Utila; I continued my diarrea(not fun!); we went to a butterfly museum and saw 12000 different kinds of butterflies and moths and some big-ass bugs and tarantulas (big big spiders)!; we saw first hand what a hurricane can do while at the same time being happy that we weren't completely in the middle of the whole thing; and we ended up flying to Utila in a little tiny airplane because there was no ferry.

Anyways, check out all the pictures here:

Traveling from Guatemala to Honduras
Diving at Utila