"Go Places. Meet People. Do Things. Underwater."

Today's blog so named because of the final certification video of the PADI Open Water Dive Course.

Monday, July 9

Woke up this morning around 7:30am and wandered downstairs to breakfast. I had vegan hashbrowns (made special for me and made everyone else jealous) and some fresh fruit while Stephen had eggs, sausage and toast. All was delicious.

While we were eating and talking to the divers who had participated in the early morning dive (again, we were not eligible to participate yet), our boat relocated to a new dive site known as "Caves", so named because of all the caves you could swim through.

By 9am we were back in our wetsuits and prepping all of our equipment. Here is what we set up every time:

My BCD and tank is the one furthest to the left, Stephen's is in the middle, and Tarik (one of the American backpackers) is on the right. The bins underneath held more of our gear. Before jumping in the water, we were required to do "buddy checks" with the following checklist: Bruce Willis Ruins All Films. While we fully disagree with this statement, we remembered it and what it stood for every time. B = BCD; W = weight belt; R = releases (from BCD, weight belt, and tank - things you do not want to lose when you jump into the ocean); A = air (make sure the tanks are open); and F = final okay, we we used to mean put on our masks and flippers.

Upon completing our buddy check, we jumped into the ocean for our 4th dive with our instructor. Here is our point of entry - the mooring line:

 
Today we went down to our maximum allowed depth of 18m for 30 minutes. We practice the few remaining exercises, including emergency ascents and compass navigation at the surface (again, not my strongest skill set). The most exciting part of this dive was that as soon as we got back onto the boat - we were CERTIFIED!!! Here's where that moment occurred - the back of the boat:

Over 100 minutes in the ocean and two days in a pool, plus As on both of our written exams - we can now claim to be PADI certified SCUBA divers! Awesome.

That said, we still had 3 more dives today. Granted, they were now optional, but we capitalized on every opportunity. Our first dive as certified divers was again in the "Caves" reef, and we opted to hire a guide - just to make sure that a) we didn't die, b) we didn't get lost, and c) to learn how to actually use our computers so that when we did dive by ourselves, we knew when to go back (not that I would be able to find the boat).

As this was our second dive of the day (dive 5 in total), we did not go down quite as deep - stopping at 16m - and unfortunately, my tank was slowly leaking air, forcing us to have to surface a little earlier than we would have preferred - coming up after 27 minutes. However, the most exciting part of this dive was the presence of a TURTLE! It was no more than 10ft away and we got to float and drift with it for a few minutes, which was really cool. The water today was again around 72F, but with a stronger current - so we were definitely getting a workout.

Then came lunch - again, delicious food with a specially prepared Sabrina-safe meal - vegetarian sushi with lots of avocado. Stephen had a linguini and bacon dish, and a curry soup with rice, that smelled fabulous. Here is where we ate:

After lunch, we had a few hours of down time while people disembarked from TAKA and a few new people came on board. Stephen and I usually spent our down time playing Gin or flipping through the local fauna books trying to identify every creature and piece of coral we saw.

Then came the real test - our first solo dive with no guide, no instructor, no other people. We were back at the "Playground" dive site. We went down to 13m for 23 minutes - and the best part - we neither got lost nor embarrassed our instructor by doing something stupid. Let me rephrase, we got lost, the blind led the lost, and yet, we found the boat, and came back up with no one suffering from decompression sickness or the bends. In our books, that qualifies as a success.

As for cool things we saw, we saw some very large parrotfish, a purple titan triggerfish, and plenty of sea cucumbers - beyond, of course, the hundreds of tropical fish.

One would think that three dives in one day would be sufficient, but alas, you would be wrong. At 6pm, we donned our cold damp swimsuits and wetsuits one final time for a night dive. Fortunately, since this was our first night dive, we were required to have a guide. Thank goodness - we were scared. It was dark. BIG things came out at night.

Before jumping in, we were handed a torch (known as a flashlight in the States) and plunged into the black abyss. There were four of us total in the group - one guide, three followers. One of the cool features about swimming at night with torches is that giant trevally (salmon sized fish) would use your light to hunt for prey and come bolting out of the darkness past you to eat whatever you illuminated. We were instructed to not illuminate the pretty fish, or we would have nothing to look at the next morning.

The most exciting part of the dive, however, was the final 10 minutes under the boat about 6 meters down, where all the fish were circling in the boat's light. There were hundreds of seabass, thousands of tiny little blue fish the seabass were hunting, and even a reef shark showed up, circling in the not too far distance. While it was unbelievably cool, we were very happy to be out of the water and finally out of our wetsuits by the end of the dive. (At this point, we had also clocked over three hours under water).

Dinner was delicious -we inhaled it while watching Die Another Day with some of the other divers on board in the mess hall. Needless to say, by 10pm, we were quite tired and ready to pass out. One more day of diving left!