Certifiable....

Two days in a classroom and pool and 4 ocean dives and we were all certified and it was time to head out on our own. After lunch we paired up and headed up the deck to hear the dive briefing paying close attention as it would have been very embarrassing to get lost our first time out. One of the advantages of being certified was that we no longer had to disassemble and reassemble our gear. We had left it all set up after the last dive so it was a case of checking our air and getting everything on as quickly as we could so we could head in to the water.

The scenery was still fabulous but there was something special about being out on our own. Of course we did bump in to the others as we swam about. Since we were all new we were keeping pretty close to the suggested route around the reef. There was lots of checking on each other and even a quick surface check at one point to make sure we were where we thought we were but even with those we still saw the usual array of colourful fish as well as a reef shark, a trigger fish which my dive buddy spotted and warned me about and also a blue spotted ray. I wasn’t that fussed about rays before but they are growing on me. They cruise about the ocean floor taking their time and seeing what’s what, I like that. On the way back we also had a close encounter with a parrot fish. Now I know everything is magnified underwater but it was fairly big and headed straight for us, I felt like we were playing the fish version of chicken. Obviously we did not collide with the fish but it was close, I swear it was!

We were really lucky on or trip. The first dive of the day had been cut short for the certified’s so the crew organised for an extra dive to be squeezed in which mean that soon I was back in the reef this time with a different dive buddy and my camera. Once again there were lots of cool fish but the highlight of this dive was that we swam through what a short almost tunnel. It wasn’t much but it was very cool and both my buddy and I loved it so much we both declared out intention of doing some wreck diving in the future, in my case asap.

The next trip  in was different again as it was a night dive. This time we were a smaller group as three of  our class opted to do a few adventure dives. For me the lure was that once I had done them I would be allowed to dive to 30m and thus dive a wreck further down the coast. You can’t go in to this wreck but you can do you wreck adventure dive and it’s meant to be one of the top ten dives in the world so it seemed worth it since I was already out there ‘n all. We had to show that we could navigate with our compasses then it was a guided tour of the ocean at night. Apparently some people don’t like that when they look back all they see is black but I loved it. I had spoken to some certifed’s about their night dive so as per their instructions I hid my torch and waved my hand through the water and sure enough lots of little light spots appeared, bioluminescence in action, very cool!

The next morning we had another early start but instead of getting an early night I stayed up to talk to some of the other divers. I was just to hyped up to go straight to sleep. I did feel a little uncomfortable as I sat with some of my class mates who within ten minutes and all headed off to bed leaving me with people I had never spoken to. Still we were soon friendly enough and passed a pleasant half hour or so until I had finally calmed down enough that I felt it was time to head to bed and sleep.