Day 75-76- Advanced Open Water!!

Monday means new volunteers, on the 8am boat we had Ben and Rita. These guys were a couple and are staying with us for 4 weeks. Ben is from Belgium and works half the season with the homeless and the other half at a bar where he met Rita. Rita is from Portugal but moved to Belgium to Brussels and works in the same bar as Ben full time. They had been travelling since April and were planning on continuing traveling til next April. I took them round the village and to the house for orientation. Our other volunteer arriving was Rob from the UK, he was due on the 12pm boat. The portuguese 3 were still in the house in the morning but were leaving on the 12pm boat, we said our goodbyes at the jetty but there was no sign of Rob. I waited til 1 and then headed back to the house, back at the house Rita and Ben were getting hungry so I took them down for lunch, Dan came with us and while we were eating I had a look across to the jetty and thought I could see someone who could be Rob. Dan had already eaten so he went to meet him. When Rob joined us he was a very stereotypical traveler, he even came with a guitar. Turns out he'd done some busking to pay for a couple of hotel rooms. After lunch Dan took them for water confidence, Rob was like a little kid and couldn't wait to get in the water. I was reviewing nesting data which is incredibly boring but important. Maisy was off to Tiga Ruang with all the new volunteers so we were free for them for a few days. We did have two volunteers arriving Wednesday for 6 days, but they were staying at PIR. This meant me and Dan could go to Sea Voice tomorrow to start our Advanced Open Water Diving!

Tuesday we were meant to be meeting someone down by the village beach at 7:45am to take us to Sea Voice as we would be diving at 8:30am. We were up at 7, I made myself a coffee and we bolted down some breakfast before we knew it we needed to leave. We got down to the beach and couldn't see the guy we were meant to meeting we waited til 8:00am then headed to the jetty to find another taxi guy. When we arrived at Sea Voice turns out the guy was sitting by the Police Station not by the beach oops. We met our instructor Chris, he was from Glasgow, Scotland, I met him last week and he seemed pretty cool. Our first dive we were going to Temple for a Deep Dive, Temple is meant to be one of the best dive sites in the Perhentians. It is a stone pinnacle with different levels of habitat that goes down to around 24 metres. At deeper water your oxygen consumption increases so the plan was to slowly circle around the pinnacle increasing ascending as we go round. It was so amazingly beautiful down there, so many fish everywhere. We saw angelfish, pufferfish, groupers, snappers all sorts of fish. The highlight for me was seeing this little Porcupine Fish, unfortunately I didn't have a camera but here is an image off google of one:

http://www.fish-species.org.uk/marine-fish/diodon-hystrix.jpg

We also saw an interesting nudibranch, these are kind of like sea slugs. They are worth looking up if you've never seen one before. Our next dive was to Batu Layar where I did my last dive of my Open Water, on this dive we would be doing a fish identification test using hand signals to identify fish family species in the water. Before our dive Chris went through a quick briefing showing you all the different fish family we need to know and should look out for on our dive. I may make a link demonstrating the different signals later and put it on here. It was a really cool dive and we saw 6 giant pufferfish all in a little group as well as some blue spotted stingray and lots of batfish. The final dive of the day was to Romantic Beach this was for our Peak Performance Dive, this was a test we could use our breathing and understood the importance and skills of navigating underwater. When we got there Chris had brought a hoop with him which we would be using later, he sunk it to the bottom using waist weights. First of all we tested we could use our breathing to stay neutrally buoyant while horizontal and vertical. This was really interesting trying to steady yourself while head down at the sand trying not to end up face into the sand. Once we had perfected this we moved onto the kiss weight test, three weights were placed out on the sand one in front of each other. Our test was to swim up to one go vertical and kiss the weight with our regulator without headbutting it, we did this to each of the weights and it was really fun, I especially enjoyed watching Dan headbutting the sand. Next activity was using the hoop, first of all was just a simple swim through it without touching. Sounds easy right? However with a tank, fins and BCD on its much harder than it seems it took a few attempts. We did this a few times in different ways, swimming upside down, swimming over then through it and swimming sideways it was really fun and difficult. The funniest test we did was the writing test while vertical head down, here you had to try to hold your buoyancy as well as write your name with a rubbish pencil on this tiny pad. We had two attempts and if Dans A of his name didn't look like a pound sign he might have won but in the end we couldn't decide between me or Chris. The final thing we did was an underwater race with our fins and weights off, we found a clear bit of sand where there were no Goby fish these are small fish that live on the sea bed. When I took off my weights I very quickly started to float it was quite hard to try and keep myself down. 3....2......1.....Go! and we attempted to run, Dan in his competitive mindset went for it and won the first race. We then turned around and had another go, this time I decided to use the water to my advantage and as I ran throw my arms back which meant I won, Dan was not happy that I kind of cheated. After the racing we put our gear back on and followed Chris to try and find our hoop as visibility was poor before heading back to the boat. We got back filled in our log books, we still have two more dives before we are officially Advanced water divers but Chris did say we can now deep dive to up to 40m. The last two dives we have left are the Wreck Diver (which I'm excited for) and the Navigation Dive, hopefully get this in before the monsoon season starts, fingers crossed. Kib from Sea Voice needed to take a day off the next day so he asked if he could come back to the village with us for a night. I thought it wouldn't be a problem as we had no volunteers and Ramona knows Kib from all the time she was at Sea Voice doing her Dive Master and she said it was fine. Kib was having some issues at Sea Voice so we went out for dinner and helped him with his problems. It was funny as they were very similar to the problems we have had at the Turtle Project. Before dinner came out he went to talk to his boss who was in the village for a check up as she was a few months pregnant. He took our advice and came back and felt a lot better just like what happened with us, it was so relatable it was scary. He had some work to do so I left him to finish that and sorted him out some bed sheets for him to sleep in the volunteer room. However, when I woke up he was still on the sofa he hadn't moved.