A Beautiful Evening at Bahia San Pedro
October
28, 2024
One
night, on a day that Falcon had napped, I was in bed reading with Falcon before
he went to sleep, when Jason called down to us that we should come up into the
cockpit. We both got out of bed and went
up, and as we stood there in the dark with Jason we watched the dark water
beside our boat. There were ghostly,
green glowing shapes, a school of fish lighting up the bioluminescence. It looked so neat.
I have always wondered what it would be like to
swim in the water with such active bioluminescence, so I got my mask and
snorkel and went down onto the swim grid.
At the slightest touch of the water it sprang to life. I slipped into the water, and watched the
ghostly forms of the fish swimming beneath me.
Watching my hands and arms out in front of me as I swam was stunning,
but the most incredible thing that I found was simply to float still with my
hands in front of my mask and make very small movements. The water around my hands lit up, but remained
quite still so that I was able to look at each individual light. They were beautiful three-dimensional glowing
shapes.
Falcon
was watching and really wanted to come in too, so Jason passed him down to me
on the swim grid. At first we just sat
and he kicked his feet in the water watching the amazing light show and
giggling with glee. Jason jumped into
the water from part way up our arch, and the explosion of light was
incredible. We then watched his glowing
form swim back to the boat under water. We all swam around for a while, and then got out and dried off. In the cockpit, before Falcon went to bed,
one of us bumped a bucket of seawater that we had. The water instantly burst into light, but
remained lit for only a few seconds. We
tried bumping the bucket and stomping beside it, and each time it burst into
light. Very cool! It was a beautiful evening!
Our first encounter with bioluminescence was in the bathroom of our cruise ship cabin (Dawn Princess - loveboat class) probably 40 years ago. In an nighttime foray to the toilet (so no turning the light on), we discovered the dancing, green lights when we flushed. With the 3 of us crammed in the closet-sized bathroom, we entertained ourselves with several flushes before going back to bed.
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting this account. It all seems so magical and I'm thrilled that your little boy is experiencing so much natural beauty with his parents. :-)
ReplyDeleteWow! what an amazing experience! I, too, had an experience once with bioluminescence here on the island, well, Salt spring island. My brothers and I were on a week end away with my mum. We were sitting on the beach, my younger brother in the water, started getting excited, saying "look, look, it's glowing! as he splashed around in the water. We thought he had a bit too much to drink. But then we got in the water and wow it was truly amazing. Once in a life time experience for me.
ReplyDeleteOh so cool! I had a similar experience, however, I had to put my survival suit on first as the water temperature was a little cooler than you might find in Mexico. I be3t Falcon was beside himself.
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