Dive, Dive, Dive

  Cairns, Australia
Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Finally I got my open water certificate and am now allowed to dive. Woo-hoo! The course was fantastic along with the group that I did it with.

Everyone

If you are planning to come to Cairns and dive, I would highly recommend Down Under Dive and especially Scotty! He really made the course for all of us. Funny guy!

Our first dive was so cool, he took us down to about 14m and we just swam around looking at the fish, getting used it everything. The really weird thing was 14m felt absolutely no different from 3m! I loved the fact that the fish would come up to you, they seem to have such personalities. On my 2nd dive I had a wrasse come up to clean me... OK I take the hint I should have put my rash vest in the wash last night!! On my 3rd dive we found a turtle, it headed straight towards me and I got to stroke it's shell as it brushed passed my chest to hang out with my buddy Stefan. As a plant scientist you can tell he's in touch with nature as the turtle made a bee-line for him and stayed with him for quite a while.... Lucky bugger!
Whilst we were doing our skills Sarah was off on another part of the reef where she found another Turtle (at last she cried!!!) and a Reef Shark!! Her buddy was so freaked out he almost stopped breathing.... Apparently he just couldn't believe he'd seen a shark.

Sarah and her new buddy

Once I had passed my course, I really had the bug for diving so I convinced Sarah that we should come back the next day to do our Adventure Dive certification. It only took her a moment, but she agreed so the next day we had our first dive together!

Us on our first dive together

Sarah said later that it was so nice to finally go diving with someone she knew well, she was completely relaxed the whole time.... We figured she used to get anxious before a dive because she'd only meet fellow divers 5 mins before getting in the water!

We did 3 dives that day: Deep water, Navigation and Bouyancy. The buoyancy was the most fun as we spent about 15min doing forward rolls, backward rolls and hovering upside down... actually more difficult than you might think as the bubbles get caught in your BCD and make you float upwards! The funniest thing we did was on the deep dive. We were testing the effects of nitrogen narcosis. We wrote the name of the boat backwards (the letters had to be backwards too!) on the surface and were timed, we then did the same exercise at 23m to see how much longer it took. It took me 17 secs to write 5 letters backwards!! Sarah had the right idea, she wrote it forwards first then copied it backwards... is that cheating???

We had a great night out with all the guys from the boat and our course at the Rattle 'n' hum to celebrate our achievement! One of the funniest moments was Scotty trying to teach the 2 Korean how to play pool. They'd never seen Pool before and thought it was fantastic..... we soon got bored when they were taking an hour over one game!

Yesterday was my first day at the cable park and it was cool! We had a ball hitting the kickers and sliders. I decided to try my first invert off a kicker, almost there just need to figure out how to come right round onto my board. Didn't have so much fun on the fun box... I landed face first on the top of it... OUCH! Sarah got brave and decided to try the A frame.... It stands about 5ft above the water.... After the first fall on her ar5e, she made it about half way up the on-ramp... not a bad effort. A couple more attempts and she'll be riding along the top!

Ouch!