This weekend I completed my Advanced Open Water at the Blue Hole in Santa Rosa New Mexico. http://www.santarosanm.org/scubadiving.htm The place is 80 feet wide by 80 feet deep. It has two platforms and is very popular with Colorado Dive Shops as a training location. The temperature is about 61 degrees. I arrived on Friday night and showed up in time for my instructor to ask me if I wanted to get started a day early. So I quickly grabbed my gear and off we went. The first dive was my altitude dive. Basically we went down to the first platform, compared gauges and then swam around for 20 minutes. What`s in the blue hole? Not much. Goldfish, crawfish, and some different things that people have left behind, like golf balls, clown statues, and tombstones to the people that have died in the caverns that are connected to the place. The next dive was my night dive. The skills were basically an out and back navigation from the platform and then a night swim. I learned two things..My pinnacle light is not powerful enough for the Blue Hole, and that my battery was dying in my computer, as it would not illuminate anymore. The downside of this was that I didn`t bring a spare battery and nowhere in Santa Rosa carries watch batteries. I was able to make it through the weekend however, but a new addition to the dive kit is in order. On Saturday, we completed the other three dives, deep, peak performance bouancy, and underwater navigation. The deep dive was probably my best dive of the weekend, since the inlet to the blue hole is at the bottom and visibility is greatest at that depth. The tombstones in particular are telling. Apparently before the grate was in place, techinical divers could head down through a cavern system that leads all the way to Carlsbad. Apparently some rec divers decided to try and navigate the caverns, which go down as far as 300 feet and ran out of air. It was a fun weekend and I will probably due some more training down there in the future.