Tuesday, May 20, 2003

Advanced Course, Day 2

Sorry, I realized I got the wrong date for the last batch of journals I did. I just fixed them.

Up at 6:30, I slept like crap, still have cold, kind of sore throat. Showered, had breakfast, went to the dive shop at 7:45, the truck picked us up about 8:15 and went to the harbour. We got to our first dive site, where we're supposed to do our deep dive, a dive down to 30 metres. Once down there, she is going to test us for nitrogen narcosis, which is a codition where you can't think properly, described kind of like being drunk and stoned. Divers usually start feeling the effects of nitrogen narcosis at about 30 metres and below.

We got in the water, and the visibility is crap again. We descended on the anchor line, and got down to about 17 metres, where the anchor line ended, and we couldn't see hardly anything. At that point, Annette decided to call off the deep dive because of the visibility, and we went on a quick fun dive around corals and rocks back to the boat. The visibility was so bad, you couldn't see the corals and rocks until they were right in front of you. Quite a few people got some scrapes and cuts on the hard corals. I got a tiny cut on my finger. As we were going up, the assistant grabbed me from underneath and had me (and another guy) stay down with him to do a safety decompression stop (to let extra nitrogen leave the body). It wasn't necessary, but more of a good practice to get into, so we hovered at about 5-8 metres for 3 minutes, then went up. When I got to the surface, Annette was in the water, and she had blood running out of her nose. She had been having sinus trouble, and her sinuses blew up underneath the water, because of the extra pressure. She of all people should have known there was trouble, but perhaps she tried to continue because of the students. We are going to try the deep dive again tomorrow.

We got back on the boat, and we went to our second dive site. Because Annette couldn't dive anymore, she had Ben take me, Courtney and Anna on our Underwater Naturalist dive. Ben got an overview of the site from one of the other instructors, and off we went. We had to identify about 5 different corals and 5 different fish types from a fish and plant ID card she had given us.

The visibility was decent on the second dive, but still no comparison to the 20-30 metres we had in Vietnam.

We finished our dives then back to the huts about 1:00, and had lunch. I went and used the internet for an hour and a half, Court and Uta got a face treatement, Anna laid on the beach.

We went for supper, then for a walk further up the main drag just to see what was there.

I was so tired, having not slept much the last few days, Anna gave me some throat and cough medicine that also makes you drowsy. I was in bed by about 8:30.

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