Now an Advanced Diver

It has been a while that I have updated this, a week in fact, and the reason is that our new generator – four days in operation – failed last Sunday evening. We only got a new one last afternoon, what with the problems of shipping and finding a suitable one. I won’t regale you with what happened; suffice to say that everything that could go wrong did. Which made for another mora mora week here at Reef Doctor. I am now an Advanced Open Water diver, which means that now I can start doing a bit more of the classroom work, working on coral and fish identification.

On Monday I did some book work and did land navigation with a compass, practicing the routes that I would be doing in the water for the Navigation dive. As I think I mentioned before, Advanced is basically a series of five dives, each one with a specific purpose in skill development. Anyway, I didn’t get into the water as a diver, and instead just did some swimming in the ocean. The water is usually a little choppy from 10 in the morning until 6 in the evening, meaning that best time to get out is either in the morning or in the evening – or else you end up swallowing a good portion of surf.

We got out onto the water for diving on Tuesday, doing two dives, both of them in the morning. Since we were out around 6 the water was like glass – a great way to start the day, moving across the water as the sun comes up over the spiny desert. The first dive was a Deep dive, and we went down to about 25 meters. The second one was the Navigation dive, and I swam squares and triangles to show that I knew how a compass worked. These were the two required dives, with the rest being my own choice.

We headed out early on Wednesday as well, managing to get our two dives in before lunch. The first was a Multilevel dive, where you have to plan the dive through different depths and times. This allows for a longer dive as otherwise you have to assume your maximum depth throughout the entirety of the dive. Since the deeper you are the more nitrogen your body accumulates, doing a multilevel means that you get to stay under longer. The second was a Photography dive. The visibility wasn’t great, but I did get a couple of good shots. There are waterproof plastic housings that are designed for digital cameras, and this is what I used. It’s basically just point and shoot, but the complication is that you have to hang motionless in the water as you do it. These means that you have to fine-tune your buoyancy, breathing shallowly so that you don’t keep on rising and falling given on the amount of air in your lungs. As you could probably guess, buoyancy is the number one skill in diving, and if you don’t have that under control it makes things pretty difficult, for picture taking as well as general swimming.

After the four dives there was only one more to go. This one was a Drift dive, meaning that we would drop into a current and then drift for however far our air lasted – or until our dive time was up. The boat followed along behind us, picking us up where we surfaced. We dropped into the south pass channel in the interior, and then drifted out the channel into the exterior. There were four of us in all, those being Johnny and myself as well as Tom and Caroline. This was the first drift dive that they have done here, so I was lucky that I was one of the four. Tom and Caroline were chosen as the other team as they headed back to the U.K. on Friday. We were thinking that the water would be moving us pretty quickly, but it was basically at a swift walking pace. There were many things to see, especially since we covered so much more ground that we would have on a normal dive. When we first dropped into the water, we were floating and organizing when Tom looked down and saw that we were over a huge school of barracuda. There were about 30-40 of these 2-3 foot fish swimming slowly beneath of us, but we didn’t get the chance to descend through the school as they were gone before we could deflate. Everyone but me saw a shoal of rays, which was too bad, but in all it was by far the most interesting dive I have done to date. It also ended up being the deepest as we were at 30 meters at one point in the dive.

On Friday, as a newly Advance diver I went out with Viv where we did a benthic point-out, which is basically a veteran surveyor going out with a newbie and showing them the types of coral on the reef. We had a remora follow us the whole way, jumping from first me then to Viv and then back again, which was pretty neat. A remora is a small fish with a sucker on its head that attach themselves to bigger fish, usually sharks, and then hitch along for the ride in the hope of getting a better chance at some food.

That was my week of diving, and on Saturday I was aiming to get out and do some surfing. Pepin, one of the Malagasy here who speaks English, has been out on the waves since he was nine years old, and he was going to take me out for some time on the breakers on the reef. He showed up this morning after an all-day absence yesterday, as he had been drinking on Friday and decided he wasn’t up to surfing on Saturday. A bit of a flake, but he did say that we would head out next weekend, which hopefully happens as it will be my last weekend here. It’s hard to believe how quickly the time has passed here, but I guess that’s how it goes with most things: looking forward, time always seems longer than when you look at the same span from over your shoulder.