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Our third day of diving found us an hour and a half south of the island, off North Cat Cay, in an area called Tuna Alley. This dive site is a wide slope, starting at 40 ft. at the top and sloping off to 120 feet over a distance of about three hundred feet. From there it rises in a reef up to eighty feet and then drops off a wall over the Continental Shelf to 3000 ft. The current was pretty strong, so
we did a pair of drift dives following Audley at a depth of fifty feet. My main impression of this dive was of being weightless and drifting over moonscape after moonscape, descending to depth to view caverns shot through the reef, huge colorful fan coral, a six-foot turtle hiding under a ledge, and schools of bar jacks, angelfish the size of dinner plates, and a million species of coral not listed on the books. I brought the camera with me both trips and tried to take
as many pictures as I could with the spectacular visibility (120 ft.)
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Unfortunately the positioning wasn't as good as the first time, so we wound up with a five-minute swim to the starting point against the current following Melanie, and then drifted for as long as our air held out. Tim was able to follow Melanie into some crevices and out the other side.
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The morning of this dive I field-modified the housing so that the mode spinner dial worked as intended; I had to remove a rubber washer on the outside of the knob with was meant to prevent shock damage to the camera, but had the unintended effect of making the knob useless (I wound up on dive two of the first day with the camera stuck in Video mode, unable to spin the dial back to Manual.) After this point, it was easy to work the Mode setting.
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We returned to the boat and found that the sea had picked up a bit (four-to five foot swells) and I sat out the third dive down, which came directly on the heels of the previous dive.
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We ate dinner at the Red Lion, a restaurant on the main strip down the street from our hotel, and had probably the best meal all week there. The main room is a bar/dancehall, and you continue back behind the bar to the left into the kitchen area, then to the back of the building where they have tables for sitting. Behind you the doors open up onto the harbor, and their menu is filled with good cuts of beef, fresh seafood, and crisp vegetables. The Red Lion was hopping this evening, and some other patrons told us stories of other folks on dive boats having severe seasickness problems.
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