Diving Cozumel when I was still new

I got to Cozumel on December 11, 2021. I stayed about five nights. Five is an estimate. I remember a short week, not the checkout date. I stayed at the Presidente InterContinental, and I dived with Scuba Du. This note is the island. Any mainland part of that trip stays off the site. The dates and the hotel are also on the Cozumel page. This one is about the diving.

I was a newer diver. I could get through a dive, and I still had to think about the dive while I was on it. I’m an SSI Rescue Diver now. That card came later. In December 2021 I was someone who had done some dives and was about to do harder ones on purpose.

Scuba Du put me on nitrox and on wrecks. Nitrox was the part I had to learn in the shop, not in the water. You analyze the tank, you write the mix down, you set the computer to match, and you do it before you get on the boat so you’re not doing math in a rush. I could follow those steps. I could not have given you a clever explanation of partial pressures. The practical effect is more time at recreational depth before the computer gets unhappy, which matters when the boat is going to do more than one dive. I was glad someone at the shop was watching the first time I set it. After that it was a checklist I could run myself.

The wrecks were the stretch. A wreck gives you a big shape to look at, and it’s easy to look at the shape and forget the gauge. I stayed with the guide. I don’t have the wreck names in my notes, so I’m not going to borrow them from a dive-site list and pretend I logged them.

I bought a Suunto D5 for this trip. Before that I was on a rented computer, which meant a different set of buttons every morning and a screen I didn’t quite trust. The D5 is the one I still dive with. I spent the first morning in the hotel room setting it up, then set it again, because the first time you put nitrox into your own computer you don’t trust the first pass. After that it was just the thing on my wrist. Same numbers, same place, every dive. That mattered more to me than any line on the spec sheet.

Cozumel is current. The usual dive there is a drift. You go with it, and the boat picks you up where you surface. I had read that before I went. Then I was in it. You don’t get to poke along the way you do in a quarry, where you can turn around and look at the same rock twice. For a newer diver that’s the lesson of the place. The skills are still the basic ones. The pace belongs to the water.

I don’t have a dive count. I don’t have the mixes. I have the week. A hotel on the water, a shop that took me out on nitrox and on wrecks, and a computer I bought so I would stop renting one. That’s enough to publish. The logbook details can go in when I actually look at the logbook.