In 1987, I made a killing on Disney stock options, decided to book my first liveaboard, and vowed to wear a Mickey Mouse T-shirt every day of the trip in Belize.

But now, when I look back from 2025 with 20/20 hindsight, I must have been out of my mind. With only 10 dives under my weight belt at the time, I was looking forward mostly to getting wet in the Great Blue Hole with a depth of 130 feet, though my deepest dives to date had only been 40 feet in Grand Cayman. What was I thinking?

Getting There Was Quite a Challenge
Ever since I got PADI-certified in 1985, I had read about the Isla Mia liveaboard boat in Belize through ads in Scuba Diving Magazine for See & Sea Travel, Carl Roessler’s company in San Francisco. So, I booked a week.

A rookie travel agent there helped line up my flights from SFO to Houston, then to  Belize, but failed to send me a list of items to bring. I had to rent a used orange horse collar buoyancy vest from the ship that nearly caused a major incident a few days later.

Anyway, I flew solo to Houston and met up with seven other Americans at the airport as we waited for our TACA airplane (a Central American carrier that’s now part of Avianca) to Belize City… and waited… and waited. Eventually, the flight was cancelled that night, the airline put us up in a nearby hotel, and we flew out the next morning. Unfortunately, we knew we’d miss at least one day of diving of the six that were planned.

Belize City Was Stinky and Repulsive
The next afternoon, we arrived in this squalid town of nearly unbearable humidity, seamy-looking drug dealers, mangy dogs running through the streets, and stinky open sewers flowing with human waste.

It was the literal arsehole of Central America.

A few crew members met us at the airport during a tropical thunderstorm, but our dive boat had left the prior afternoon with 10 other passengers and was anchored at Lighthouse Reef, about 50 miles away. They wanted our group (whom we named “The Eight Musketeers”) to board a large panga with no roof, a small motor, along with our dive gear and suitcases, and chug out to our dive boat in the dead of night in a driving storm with only a small lantern for guidance. We collectively yelled, “No way, José!”

Next, we insisted they call the captain on the boat. He reluctantly agreed to come back for us, and we waited in a hotel lobby for about four hours until our liveaboard arrived.

The Isla Mia Was Rustic, But Functional
With a length of 75 feet, we had read beforehand in brochures that this ship was functional for divers (though we had no means of comparison to today’s plush liveaboards that boast hot tubs, private bathrooms, and gourmet meals). There were storage units on the deck for dive gear and separate areas for cameras and other stuff.

When we boarded around midnight, the ship’s A/C had broken temporarily, so I climbed into my upper bunk bed, and was literally tossed into the air all night long. It was hot. It was humid. And I was lying in a puddle of sweat as we bucked through the continuing storm. I eventually bent my knees and put my feet on the ceiling to anchor my body to the mattress as I tried to sleep.

The double rooms were small. I had to share it with a diver I just met there; fortunately, he didn’t snore. Two heads and showers were down the hall below decks, with a half-bath near the kitchen and dining salon lined with fish ID books and video cassettes on the middle deck. The upper sun deck was for relaxing between dives and after dinner.

By morning, groggy from lack of sleep, most of The Eight Musketeers had gotten sick, including me. But after a hearty breakfast of scrambled eggs, greasy bacon, buttered toast, black coffee, orange juice, and freshly sliced papaya, we started diving in the Mesoamerican Reef (MAR), the world’s second-largest, next to the Great Barrier Reef, which is why we were all here in the first place. Better yet, the A/C was fixed later that day, which enabled all of us to sleep well after that.

The daily lunch consisted of sandwiches, salads, fruit, and fresh cookies for dessert, while snacks were served in the afternoon.

Dinners were mostly fresh fish, with salads, vegetables, homemade bread, and that day’s pie. Beer, wine, and hard liquor were inexpensive.

During all the meals, our group of eight sat mixed and matched with other divers at the tables. We noted several Canadians and a few Russians who chain-smoked off the back of the ship, day and night, but were generally friendly.

Best of All, The Diving Was Superb
Diving in Belize was as great as advertised by Sea & Sea Travel brochures and magazine stories about its teeming reefs, The Great Blue Hole, and Belize’s overall biodiversity. (Remember, this trip was in 1987, so global use of the Internet as we now know it for research and instant information was still about three years away.)

All of my descents during a shortened week were spectacular. The water and air temps averaged 80 degrees, so I was never chilled diving in my Farmer John 6.5 mm wetsuit with a Mickey Mouse T-shirt underneath. Visibility ranged from 60 to 100’ or more. I was amazed at the overall variety of sea life on every dive.

The reef included many different hard corals like brain, cabbage, and an occasional staghorn. Sea fans were huge and abundant, stretching up to six feet across, for my photos that silhouetted them against the bright sun in the sky above.

Everything we saw, from hawksbill turtles to barracuda to a few species of sharks, was a thrill. We encountered dozens of species of tropical fish, including sergeant majors, squirrelfish, butterflyfish, blue damsels, gray and French angelfish, yellowtail, snapper, blue reef chromis, huge groupers, spiny urchins, and more.

During our three, one-tank night dives, I didn’t see as much as I had hoped for. In our briefing on the ship before one night with a full moon, the divemaster suggested that we turn off our flashlights for a minute to see what we could see; the answer was “not much”. Anyway, it was interesting to see some sleeping parrotfish in their “ball” of saliva (a mucus cocoon that protects them from parasites) and sea cucumbers, AKA “vacuum cleaner worms” that seemed as long as some garden hoses.

“Belize, We’ve Got a Problem”
On my sixth dive here, we planned to descend to 130 feet as practice for The Great Blue Hole the following day. At that depth, I pushed the inflator button on my rented BCD and it froze. I suddenly started rising quickly towards the surface and I couldn’t get my vest to deflate.

From my PADI training, I knew that if I held my breath, my lungs would explode like a balloon with too much air, so I hyperventilated by taking lots of deep breaths. My divemaster followed me to the surface, I told him the problem, he unplugged my inflator button and plugged it back into my regulator, and I descended quickly to decompress for about 10 minutes. Fortunately, all was OK, though I was lucky to have not gotten bent.

The Great Blue Hole Was Great!
On the fourth day of this liveaboard trip, we motored to a part of Lighthouse Reef known internationally as one of the planet’s most interesting sinkholes. Our dive boat briefing told us that we’d stay at 130 feet for about five minutes, then take a safety stop.

The details of my deep descent have been chronicled in my story, “Low Anxiety: Getting Narked in Belize’s Great Blue Hole” that appears in the “A Taste of My Own Medicine” section of this book.

For this adventure, 12 divers from our boat snorkeled out about 100 feet to a sandy reef, then started our descent, flanked by the divemaster and our captain, John. Within a few minutes, we stabilized at 130 feet in a cavern, with stalactites (calcium carbonate) hanging down from the ceiling and stalagmites on the sides growing up. We couldn’t see the bottom which was about 410 feet deep (or 280 feet below us).

This is where I got narked for the first time. I didn’t realize that my watch, which had a depth maximum of 150 feet, was broken, so the minute hand kept sliding forward and backward. I just followed the divemaster and my group up through the thermocline between 50 and 100 feet, with warmer water above and colder below.

Paul Humaan Was Also On Board
We were very fortunate to have Paul on the Isla Mia that week. He was a wonderful man, an extremely experienced diver––I swear he had gills because his bottom dive was double anyone else’s––and he was working on one of his 13 marine life books.

He took this photo of me, even loaned me a camera on a few dives, and shared many tips, such as “Shoot up, not down”… “Bracket your aperture”… and “Get close to your subjects”. Sadly, he passed away in 2024.

My Final Thoughts of The Isla Mia and Belize
Despite a few complaints about the delays, the ship, and its equipment, this was a great experience as my first liveaboard. Overall, the diving was wonderful. The air and water temperatures were warm. And my fellow divers were friendly.

As I review my logbook, I see this note, “A liveaboard is the best way to dive––you go when you want, as often as you want. I took 14 dives in 4.5 days as a newbie, with three one-tank night dives, two deep dives, and had great camaraderie with my shipmates.”