Cozumel was my first real dive trip. It was also one of my favorite. I stayed at the "Plaza Las Glorias". There's a department store right across the street from the hotel now, so if you forget anything you can probably get it there. The hotel is within walking distance of San Miguel. There are some interesting shops quite a few restaurants and a ferry to the mainland. They have a dive shop "Aqua Safari" downstairs at the hotel. It's great, they give you a locker at the beginning of the week so you don't have to lug your gear upstairs everyday. This is one of the few places I've stayed where there is truly unlimited diving. We would do a couple of boat dives a day, then if I could find a buddy I would do another afternoon dive right in front of the hotel. Then of course there were the night dives. We did two night dives off of the boat, but some of the best night dives were right in front of the hotel. You just have to walk to the end of the dock and you're on the reef. The water was only about twenty feet deep so you could dive almost indefinitly. We were doing two hour dives every night. We usually ended the dive because we were cold (yes that's right 85 degree water does feel cold if you stay in it long enough). The diving right in front of the hotel was great.

I believe this is a whitespotted filefish. They go through a lot of color changes. It sometimes appears as if they're changing right before your eyes. I'm not sure if they are changing or it's just an illusion created by light and shadows. I think this one is in between the orange phase and the whitespotted phase. They are often mistaken for triggerfish, but they're in a different family.

This is a juvenile stoplight parrotfish (the darker of the two fish) and according to my fish ID book, what appears to be a white grunt. The parrotfish goes through many changes in its lifetime, some even change from female to male.

This is a mature stoplight parrotfish. I took this picture on a night dive. I was fairly new to diving and the current was ripping. I thought I did such a good job stalking my subject so as not to startle him. Later I found out that they sleep on the reef at night so I would have had to wake him up before I startled him. They don't have eyelids so they look awake.

This is a painting I picked up on my recent trip to Cozumel. The weekend before I left for Cozumel on my last trip I was in Times Square in New York City. There were guys on the street doing paintings incredibly similar to this one. I almost bought one, but I didn't, so when I saw them in Cozumel I thought it would make a good souvenir. It's actual size is 16" by 20". I wanted to put up a full screen image but I had to scan it in four sections so it looks a little choppy when it's full size.