Open Water to Advanced

Now that I am an Open Water Diver, I am starting out on the Advanced certification. Open Water is basically just four dives to make sure you can swim and breathe from a regulator – the very basics. If you don’t progress from this, then every time you go to dive you have to be supervised by someone with a higher certification, and you cannot descend to a depth greater than 18 meters. The next level after Open Water is Advanced, followed by Rescue, Divemaster and finally Instructor. The Advanced certification involves five different dives, each of them intended to increase skills and proficiency in the water. It is a bit personalized in that you get to pick which five you would like to do, choosing from options like night and drift dives, underwater photography, boat dives (which each of our dives here is), deep dive (down to 30 meters) and others. Claire is the one who taught my Open Water course, and now she has gone home, so the new Instructor, Johnny, will be bringing me out for the Advanced portion.

I’ve been out on six dives so far, and I have to confess that at first it wasn’t the fantastic experience that I imagined it to be. The incredible profusion of life and the experience of weightlessness are great, but before my sixth dive I didn’t see it as something that I would be that interested in pursuing after my time here in Madagascar. However, now after my sixth dive, I have a completely different perspective. For my sixth dive we headed out to a dive site known as Coral Garden, inside the reef just north of the south pass. It was the deepest dive that I had been on, and we dropped meter after meter in the water, our bubbles sparkling towards the surface. The topography of the area is fantastic, with massive irregular columns of coral reaching nearly to the surface, with wide sandy channels snaking their way in between them. There were four of us on the dive and for the first ten minutes or so we kicked against the tide channeling between the columns, moving a foot for every six feet of effort. I still don’t know enough of the words for what I am looking at, but we did get to see a humphead wrasse, a gigantic fish that I spotted swimming above us. There were a dozen sea snakes waving like flexible green pencils out of the sand floor and of course the anemones and fish that I have seen on all of my previous dives. On our way back to the boat I swam through a school of fish, and spun around as I kicked, watching the fish split, circle and close the gap that they had allowed for me to pass. The visibility was the best that I had experienced as well, and we were able to see a good 35-40 ft, which made the dive that much more enjoyable. All in all, I am now looking forward to my next dive.

This dive was Friday afternoon, and after that we headed in for a fund-raising party in Tulear. We were incredible lucky, and got into the back of a Mitsubishi pick-up only minutes after walking away from Reef Doctor. Seven of us sat in the back of the truck, and it was much more comfortable than my ride in the taxi-brousse the previous weekend. After the party, I headed back to the hotel, and then Johnny came in an hour after me. He had foolishly decided to walk back, and after having too many drinks, he made an easy target. That is to say, he was mugged. Five guys jumped him on his way back to the hotel, rifling through his pockets while he drunkenly and ineffectually swung at them. He is money was in a zippered pocket which they missed, but they did make off with his cell phone. Johnny figured he deserved what he got for his stupidity, as the rule is to never walk anywhere after dark in Tulear – especially alone, and especially inebriated.

Our trip back on Saturday did not go as smoothly as trip into Tulear, and we (Johnny, Anne, me) waited for over two hours in the sun at the taxi-brousse station, trying to hitch a ride in a quatre-quatre. We finally got one, and when I made it back to Reef Doctor it was none too soon. Let me just say that my stomach problems have yet to subside.

Supper was pizza in Mangily, which seems to be a weekend ritual here, though the two hour round-trip walk makes it barely worth it. Stomach problems slowed me on the way back, but hopefully some immodium with curtail what has unfortunately turned into a daily problem.

There you have the lengthy description of my last few December days in Madagascar. It really doesn’t feel like December at all, and aside from some Bing Crosby on the plane over to Tana, I have had nothing to really remind me of coming Christmas. Still, I am counting down the days until I put my feet up in my hammock on the 25th and sip some holiday cider that Mom gave me to take along for that express purpose.