23rd oct

---

23rd oct 2009

Been a fair few days since I've written a blog entry, sorry to those that have missed it but Internet time is double the usual price here on this
Island. There's been alot going on, I finished my open water and decided to go for the advanced which included a navigation dive, a naturalist dive with a camera, peak performance bouyancy dive, a deep dive and a night dive!
I found I'm just as crap at navigating underwater as I am on the surface during the first, next was naturalist where you have to learn the names of everthing, good thing was that I hired a camera for that one too so got a few nice pics from the deep. The bouyancy dive gave me a chance to perfect my skills in moving efficiently down there, being almost weightless allows you to get into any position, ascend and decent just by breathing at the right time, it's pretty cool when you get used to it. The night dive was the one I was most anxious about as it's strange enough down there without being in the pitch black too, turned out to be fine however and was a good expirience although I didn't see a great deal.
The definate highlight of my diving adventures was the deep dive, it was early morning and we had a breif about the effects of diving deep such as increased air useage and nitrogen narcosis where your body absorbs the nitrogen and you feel stoned, divers have been known to giggle uncontrolably and do strange things like offering their regulator to fish or trying to turn it off altogether! Luckily I'm well trained in this type of feeling ;o)

So we jumped off the boat and began our decent to 30m equalising as we went, I knelt on the sea bed and we did our usual air checks, as I signed that I had 180 bar pressure I noticed our instuctor was not the least bit interested, his excitement was very clear as he made the sign for SHARK!! I looked around and there it was, a 3m bull shark closely followed by a second. I was in total awe of such an amazing sight, I just knelt there and stared for a few moments, they were about 5m away! I felt so excited but not in any way fearful, maybe it was nitrogen narcosis or the fact it was like watching them on tv from my sofa, I am not the kind of person to put on a brave front or brag about not being scared but that was truely the case, defenantly one of the highlights of my life, a big tick in a box for that one!

---