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| Shortly after we did our scuba certification back in February, we decided to look around for a liveaboard dive trip to try out our new skills. Randy looked in some magazines and on the internet, and found the Nekton Pilot. It's a unique dive boat, based on a U.S. Navy design that puts the boat up above the waves, supported by four large metal legs on top of two large pontoons. It delivers a very stable ride, with lots of usable space. The top deck alone is a large, flat 3200 square feet. We booked our trip in March, the only problem was that we had to wait until June! Finally, the big day arrived.
We arrived in Fort Lauderdale Saturday evening at about 5:20pm. After picking up our luggage the Nekton Cruises van picked us up and took us and two other passengers, Dave and Phillip to the Nekton Pilot, after a quick stop for dinner. We boarded the boat and were shown to our cabin, #10. It was decent sized (for a boat), with our own shower and A/C. Over the next hour or so the rest of the passengers boarded the boat. At about 9pm we all assembled on the top deck for a briefing on the boat and to watch as we sailed out of Port Everglades. The boat sailed through the night as we tried to adjust to the time change which had us going to sleep at 7pm our time! Sunday morning we awakened with the boat moored at Indian Cay. After breakfast we went upstairs for our dive briefing where they went over all of the rules of the boat. Afterwards we headed down to the dive deck for our fist dive of the trip. We went down to about 40 feet, with decent visibility, though there wasn't a huge amount of marine life. All of our new gear seemed to work very well.
During lunch the boat moved to Scotos Reef, which was a bit deeper, 50-60 feet. The visibility was much better, 80+ feet. This time Randy took the camera along and got some great pictures, though the extra work of dealing with the camera used up air faster. Later in the afternoon we went for our third dive of the day at the same site. This time it was no camera, just looking at the fish. Afterwards up on deck we saw a pod of spotted dolphins which swam up to the boat a few times. Some people jumped in the water with their snorkels, but the dolphins didn't stick around much after that!
Around 6pm we had dinner, hearing every one talk about what they had seen that day. We didn't do the night dive as we had never done it before and wanted to wait until we had an instructor with us. Our instructor Matt gave us our course material that night, and we read through a couple of chapters to get a head start for the next day. |
