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11/20/10

5:45 am wake up call for the morning dive. I was afraid I was going to oversleep and I had stashed away my watch somewhere in my pack and could not find it. I woke up and the sun was shinning in my room and I did a look out the window to see if I could see scuba divers surfacing or getting ready to descend. I saw no one and then I turned on the TV hoping that the morning show or the TV might show the time.... no luck. I then decided to get up and head out to the second deck where we do the dive briefing. This was to be my deep water dive as part of the advanced course and one that I did not want to miss. As an open water diver you are able to go down to 60 feet or 18 meters and as an advanced diver you are able to go down to 100 feet or something like that. It turns out that I left my room 5 minutes before they knocked on my door to do the wake up call.

5:50 am Dive brief we were sit at Saxon Reef and the Corral Gardens dive site. One of my buddies when I am not doing my course dives is James and while we were listening to the briefing of the tide and what the basic dive plan should be we both noticed that our other buddy Chris was not out here. James said maybe Chris was more into diving into his pillow at this time in the morning which I found hard to believe. He ended up coming out after the briefing and said no one had knocked on his door but was still able to buddy up with James and do the dive.

6:15 am I went out and did my deep dive and we went down to 23 meters. At that dept our instructor had brought part of a noodle to show how the compression of that dept would squeeze it together much like what was happening to our wet suits. He also brought down a color chart to show us with a flash light that the color red is the first color to go away. It turned out to be a very nice dive and the extra depth did not bother me at all. I also found it funny that our instructor was asking each of us what our air pressure gages were at and a fish that had been hanging around looking for food went in to his hand and bit his finger. This was a bit painful and then he started to swing at the fish like a underwater boxer which I found very amusing. I was also interested to see Adam find a towel on the bottom of the ocean floor at like 20 meters and he stopped and picked it up and tied it around his waste so he did the rest of the dive in what looked like a white skirt. The biggest news of this dive is that I saw my first sea turtle swimming by me about 10 meters away. I noticed I did an underwater fist pump......yep, I was excited I had been hoping to see at least one but until now had not been lucky enough to see one.

7:30 am breakfast in the dinning hall I decided to sit with Jens (pronounced Yens) who is a nice German man who has retired to Cape Town, South Africa. This turned out to be a bit of a mistake since everyone else at the table spoke German and the only German word I know is "nine" or no. I talked to Jens a bit but for the most part the four others just had a conversation in German while I enjoyed my pancakes, bacon, and eggs.

8:15 am Dive brief and we had moved to a different dive site on Saxon Reef and we were now on the dive site Twin Peaks.

8:37 am This was my navigation dive with the instructor Joanna for my advance course. We went over using the compass on the second deck and over the other skills we would be covering on the dive before we got in the water. One thing that I found interesting in this section was measuring your kick strokes as a measure of how far you have traveled. In this dive we descended 4 meters under the boat and the swam towards the front counting our number of kick strokes. I found out that I kicked 50 kicks in the 30 meters.

When this dive ended I knew that I had to finish up my book work for the last dive of the advanced course. This was the dive we got to choose from one of the options of underwater naturalist, boat dive, or underwater photography. I decided to do the underwater naturalist which was straight forward enough I just had to identify some different fish and coral.

11 am dive briefing and we were at the same location on Saxon Reef and the dive site Twin Peaks. The instructor Adam went over what we had chosen and two of us decided to go with the underwater naturalist and the other chose a boat dive. Since we went in a group we would dive from the small boat together and then the other two of us would do our thing. The boat entry was different our driver took the small raft boat to our entry site and we were instructed that we all need to go in at the same time. We were to cross our fins and hold our mask and regulator with our left hand and the back of our heads with our right hand on entry. On the count of three we all pushed off and rolled back of the boat and then swam away from the boat towards the front to meet up. The dive went well and I saw a lot of aquatic animals which was nice for this dive since it is much easier to identify things if you actually see stuff.

12:30 pm Lunch was great and I sat with my friends from the UK (James and Julie, and Chris) and just had fun chatting with them and we were all excited for our up coming dives. I was also happy to be able to just relax and hang out in between dives and not worry about reading the text book or doing chapter quizzes.

After lunch I took care of my advanced certificate paperwork and received my temporary card. Once this was done we had a quite long break while some people who were only staying on the boat one night would transfer off the boat and others would transfer on the boat. I decided to take this extra time and sneak in a nice little nap.

3 pm Dive briefing and our new location was Normans Reef at a site called the Sharks Playground.

3:18 Got out on the dive with my buddies from before James and Chris and I was determined to stay more relaxed and do a better job of being efficient with my air so I could stay down longer. Before I entered the water on my equipment check they noticed that my connection to my regulator seem to be leaking some so they told my buddy to check it in the water and if created big bubbles that it would need to be changed. Upon entry my buddy looked it over and said he thought it would be a problem. I got one of the staff members attention and he came and looked while I was still in the water and he agreed that it needed to be changed. I climbed out and sat on the top of the stairs while they changed my regulator, and dive computer. My buddies waited at the surface for me for the 10 minutes or so which this was taking place. It got changed over and I did a roll forward off the front step to reenter. I went to put in my snorkel and noticed that it was have gotten jarred loose and fallen off. This was the second one that I had already lost so I was a bit disappointed. Once the dive got going it went well and we saw more sharks and a lot of fish.

Dinner was good and after dinner we all were just relaxing and getting to know some of the new divers that had boarded the boat today. A group of about six were out on the boat doing the completion of their open water dive certification check off dives. In this group included my new roommate name Eli. He is from Ireland and he seemed like a pretty nice guy. This group also included a guy from San Fransisco, and a girl from Texas. These divers were not able to do the night dive and as we were all waiting around we could see the spotlights come on in both the Stern and the Bow of the boat. These lights going on attracted big schools of fish that were good sized fish and these fish attracted the sharks. This was very neat to see 5 to 8 sharks circling around right off the dive deck of the boat in about 2 to 5 meters deep. In a little while we would be entering to do our night dive at that same location.

7 pm Dive briefing of the same site as before Normans Reef and the dive site called Sharks Playground. The night dive briefing was very similar to the previous night dive briefing and my buddies decided that they would both upgrade and pay the additional six dollars for the bigger flashlight. I was against that since I thought the one they let us use worked just fine for me. I also figured if they both had bigger flashlights and I was diving with them we would be looking at the same stuff so I would benefit from them having the stronger lights. The dive was great and saw a lot of sharks very close. I also saw my first starfish on the reef which I found very exciting even though the size was smaller then my fist. The stop we did on the way back up waiting 3 minutes at 5 meters was fantastic since I was just able to watch the sharks. Right before I got back to the boat I saw a shark swim right under me no more then two or three meters below. I got back on the boat and was pumped that I made it 35 minutes that was the longest dive time I had so far. I was starting to get the hang of this and that was very encouraging.

8:30 pm Dessert time and I gave myself an extra scoop of ice cream to celebrate my longest dive time so far.