Reading about someone else’s dive vacation is like reading about someone else having sex - it’s not nearly as much fun as doing it yourself. Still, a few Stageleft readers are SCUBA divers, and I thought they might like to see how I made out with my new camera and housing.

Here’s one of the prettiest fish in the Caribbean (and one of the most common), an Angelfish. They usually swim in pairs, and they’re about the size of a dinner plate.

My buddy and director George approaching the largest wreck on Utila, the Haliburton. No kidding, it really is called that.

And here’s a grouper who lives in the wheelhouse of the Haliburton, whom we christened, of course, “Cheney.”

The south shore of Utila features walls encrusted with soft corals, which look like ferns, dropping in some areas hundreds of feet into the deep Cayman trench. Late afternoon light is soft, diffuse, and mysterious.

But most coral, close-up, is wildly colourful…when lit, the reef looks like an explosion in a paint factory. Here a rainbow parrot fish nibbles on the coral. You can actually hear the sound of a healthy reef…thousands of parrot fish feeding sound like a fat man rolling around on mattress stuffed with Rice Crispies.

A small Southern Stingray seeking desperately to avoid attention. Moments later it brandished a little placard reading “Beware! Remember Steve Irwin!”

The terrain on the north side of the island is even more dramatic - caves, caverns, swim throughs, and some thousand foot walls.

More fun - I found myself in the middle of a big school of chubs circling a reef head. I think they were worshiping me.

We took a day off to lose the nitrogen in our system and flew south to Honduras, then drove inland to Copan, the most beautiful Mayan ruin I have ever visited (and I’ve been visiting them since 1979.) This is the view from the ruler’s palace.

In the last ten minutes of the last dive on the last day, the reef rewarded us with a school of squid. Here’s your calamari, sir, up close and personal.

Enough self indulgence. As you can see, I haven’t quite mastered the strobe; there’s a lot of fiddly bits to consider in underwater photography, plus your subject is always in motion. But by the end of the trip I was starting to get the hang of it.