Day 19 - green eyes in the dark!

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My glands are still up so no diving this morning. Grrrr. Alex is also suffering from an ear infection that will stop him diving for 2 weeks. He and Kasper have decided to leave tomorrow on the boat trip to Flores and Komodo to hunt dragons (by camera of course). The trip is 4 days there on a boat which does not sound ideal to me even if Flores and Komodo do sound amazing. Regardless, I am constricted by time and would not be able to go anyway. A day spend hanging around in the pool and on the beach again. Not what I wanted to do, but fun in its own way.

By late afternoon, I had decided to give diving a try. If it hurt too much, I'd just get back on the boat. The Advanced course consists of 5 more dives. Deep Diving (to 30m) and Underwater Navigation (more compass work) are mandatory, and then you have 3 electives. One of my electives is a Night Dive so just as the sun was setting at 18.00, I kitted up and headed out to the boat with Kate, my new instructor and a Canadian guy. The sea at night is bizarre. You have really powerful torches to see where you are going, but outside that scope there is just black. We had only been down seconds when Kate spotted the green eyes of a shark. She signed to us that it was there. Neither of us had seen it but were now intensely aware that it was there, just out of torchlight. My heart was pounding the theme to Jaws!! It's so funny - you run through your options: swim away - but which direction? - you don't know where it is!; Surface - the boat has gone and won't be back for aat least half an hour so you'll just wait on the surface!; forget about it and carry on!! - and that is what we did!! Every now and again I would remember but the truth is, it was probably scared of the lights and long gone!!! I was desperate to see sharks, but wanted to see on in the light first so I knew was I was dealing with!!

The Canadian guy was just finishing his Advanced so should have been quite good in the water but he was all over the place. You are supposed to keep your hands still and not use them (hence mine under my tank in most of the photos!) but he was all over the place. Twice, he got his hands caught up in my hoses and pulled my air regulator clean out of my mouth. The first time I ignored it and moved further away. The second time, I grabbed him, shone the torch in my face and pointed angrily at my reg. That air is pretty important underwater!!!

The rest of the dive went well and we didn't see the shark again. At the end, we covered our torches so that we were in pitch black and loads of plankton and little organisms started glowing in the dark. Amazing!!

Monday nights are party night at Blue Marlin, so we planned to do 3 dives tomorrow and have the morning off for recovery on Tuesday with my final dive in the afternoon. A busy day tomorrow!

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