Pompano Beach

After Wreck Fest, we decided to have a bit of a holiday from diving and go rest along the coast just above Miami at Pompano Beach. It sounds strange that you would need a holiday from a holiday, but technical diving is hard work, especially for us softies who work a desk job day in and day out.

On a typical diving day, we wake up at about 6 / 6h30 to put our counter lungs, loops, stack and head back together after the cleaning the night before. We check our O2 cell calibrations and positive and negative check our loops. If we're lucky this goes well and we can head for breakfast, if not we spend time fixing anything that's gone wrong. Then we scoff down breakfast, wash up and make lunch for the day. Torch, heater and scooter batteries get connected and we pack everything into the car. Often we have to pick up gas (dil and O2) from a shop on the way to the dive site. Then at the dive site we carry everything out to the assembly area, check our stage cylinders and carry them to the water. We make final assembly on our machines, recheck the negative, put in the batteries and pre-breathe to kick start the zorb and do a final check that we can breathe the loop for a few minutes without feeling funny. Finally we jump into our suits and into our machines. Once assembled we do the heavy walk to the water amongst gawking spring swimmers who all want to ask us "what do you see in the cave?" or "is that heavy?" or even "are you going scuba diving?"!? Once in the water we still have to clip on our stages, turn on the torches and do final checks. Then peace as we slip under the water and start the dive, weightless and quiet, it's heaven. Usually this dive starts between 8h30 and 10h00 depending on how quickly we managed to get ready.

Our dives are usually 60-120min. If we're scootering then it's fairly easy, but if we're swimming against current then we work quite hard. You shouldn't over exert with your breathing on a rebreather, and I think I spend more time making sure I'm breathing correctly than anything else. But this part is most obviously the most fun. Tunnels, mazes, routes you've never been before, routes you've seen on a map and now try to match with what you experience underwater, feeling like you're in space as you maneuver around feet in the "air". I could go on and on because so many parts of the experience come together to form a whole sense of happiness. Once we're out however the work starts again. Firstly, you're usually freezing and the only thing occupying your mind is getting the equipment off and getting into the sun. Secondly, you usually desperately need the bathroom (for a small bladdered person like myself this often wages a war with the cold). But getting out of the kit usually takes 15min or more (and remember you spent about 10-20min of deco thinking only of how much you need the bathroom and how badly you're shivering!).

We usually do more than one dive, so the next hour or so is spent warming up, eating some lunch and discussing the plans for the next dive. Then you start the process all over again. After that second dive, you need to rinse and dry as much of the equipment as possible before carrying everything back to the car. Then you need to get your cylinders in for filling (and make sure you know what dives you're doing the next day and what gas you want for your fills). From there it's usually a scramble to catch some shops open to get food for dinner and the next day, often a trip to the pharmacy for aches and pains and cuts and ear-ache, and then "home" to carry everything out once again.

Now you have to find a space to hang all the wet kit in a tiny motel room. Then you have to either clean or rinse the loop and lungs from the machines. And take out and re-charge all the batteries: we have 2 x scooter, 2 x torch, 8 x hammerhead, 2 x X1, 1 x wetsuit vest and 13 x camera = 28 batteries to charge, excluding the ipads, phones and notebooks. By the time we make dinner and get a chance to shower ourselves it is already 8pm.

So the diving is awesome and we love it, but every now and then you need an off-day from all the carrying and cleaning. So Pompano Beach was scheduled to be our beach holiday rest period after a month of diving :)

We drove up through Miami and drove all the way along the coast from South Beach and up to Miami Beach and then North Beach. South Beach was pumping, even at 10 in the morning the cafes and restaurants were busy. It's a beach stretch that reminded me of Camps Bay, just busier with many more shops. Otherwise the coast line is much the same all the way up with a sandy beach and flat warm sea, and then a wide river channel approximately 2 to 4 blocks back that runs parallel with the sea. We got stopped by a draw bridge over that channel on our way in to Pompano Beach.

Draw Bridge up driving in to Pompano Beach

We stayed at the Beachcomber Beach Resort right on the sea front. Once again TripAdvisor and booking though Hotels.com came through for us getting us a really good deal on a room. We had a very chilled 3 days swimming in the sea and the pool and reading books in the sun ... just what the tired bodies needed.