18 April

This morning we got up a little earlier than usual for vacationers - just before 8 to be in time for breakfast and walked across the island to Long beach where our water taxi was waiting to take us to Turtle bay divers on the large Island, Besar Perhentian. We arrived, signed in, made the necessary payment and met our instructor.

Brie (Breanne) began a brief review of the theory to ensure we had it properly under control, before explaining where we would perform the dives and what was expected of us. After the formalities were finished we grabbed our gear and headed for the boat to take us to the dive site. Here we geared up and did a backroll from the boat into the water. The Peak Performance Buoyancy dive was 52 minutes in total and required us to do a controlled decent, swim through hoops from different angles, leg pivot and passing of weights while maintaining your buoyancy, summersaults, superman, slate and yoga tests.

After the dive we rinsed our gear and headed for lunch at Mama's, here we toured Asia and sampled the Bee Hoon Hong Kong and Bee Hoon Singapore noodles. The BHHK consists of an omelet with Bee Hoon (very thin noodles) inside and veggies. The Singapore Bee Hoon consists of Bee Hoon noodles mixed with veggies and a fried egg on top. Yes, I know how it sounds but its really good.

The next dive was the navigation and this required we review the theory and some practical tests with the compass before leaving for the turquoise waters. We dropped down at 15h00 for a 62 minute dive, starting with kick cycles and time distance tests, this was followed by navigating a straight line and swimming back and navigating a square. We ended our dive with a mixture of a fun dive and a natural navigation test. Basically we swam along the reef, different objects were identified and on the way back we had to find these objects and show them to the instructor as well as finding the buoy.

The dive was quite an exciting dive - cuttlefish, true and false clown fish and a turtle all at close proximities. After the dive we headed home to wash the gear and prepare for the return to the small Island, this took more than an hour.

Back home photos were taken of a picturesque sunset, after which we headed down to the dinning area for a green Thai curry (yes it was hot) and another curry the name of which I can neither remember nor probably pronounce. The movie for the evening was Twilight which we decided to watch - I should have listened to Leanne and gone to bed!