Day 3 - yay! We are officially Open Water Divers! Such a good day today. We packed up our gear and set off to the boat after a quick test on chapters 4&5. The journey to the first dive site was about 45mins so Adnan gave us our final exam to do together and we got it all right bar the dive table ones, but 'no worry, no one use dive table any more, all computer' was his verdict!! Our first dive was a fun dive down to 18m! Had to equalize my ears quite a lot. Marcella and Tyler who were on our first ever dive where there again today diving with us. We were down for nearly an hour and we had to follow the line down due to currents. We saw lots more amazing fishys and it was do fun just being able to swim about knowing we were divers! Adnan had brought his underwater camera so that he could take photos for us which was cool. We got back on the boat and snacked on pineapple and these lush chocolate things! Before we started our second dive at shark reef, we had 3 more skills we had to do. One was putting our BCD on in the water, then our waistbelt and finally the emergency ascent from 6m. You had to take one breath and then say aaaaaaa looking upwards to let the air out as you ascended. We then made our final dive ( ;( ) to 18m again. Really beautiful site. Lots of different kinds of coral, and tree worms and we saw a Titan triggerfish (the territorial breed). Absolutely massive, but Adnan gave the ok sign so we could swim by without it attacking us! Arthur spotted a blue spotted sting ray under a rock, beautiful with electric blue rings! We saw lots of types of groupers and angelfish and other small fish and my favourite parrotfish ( not pirate as I thought they were called!) but the best part had to be seeing the turtle! We had told Adnan it was our mission to see one and some other divers signalled there was one back the way they had come. So we went searching and found it. Got such good views and swam right over it. We had thought if we saw one it would just swim by or away from us, but it couldn't care less that we were there! We got to watch it eating for a while and then moved on. We also saw the ugly giant grouper which was hiding under a rock! We made our final ascent and did a practice 3min saftey stop at 5m which you should do on deeper dives and then got back on the boat and out our gear for the last time. Back to the dive school, cleaned off our gear and were given our log books and some things to send off and thanked and said bye to everyone!
Was so much fun learning to dive and we were so proud of each other for achieving something, we already want to go on to do Advanced Open Water and then I want to learn to be an underwater photographer!! Wished I'd had a camera the whole time!! Sad were not diving tomorrow but were also glad we can have a lie in, eat a huge brekky and sit by the pool!