My Open Water Dive Course

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I just completed my Open Water Dive course last week at Tioman. This is my 2nd trip to Tioman Island. Basically, there's not much things to see on the island itself. You must explore the underwater world to make Tioman worth the visit.

We departed from Singapore at around 7pm on Friday and reached at Mersing around 12 midnight. The ferry to Tioman departed at 8am in the morning, so we stayed at a local hotel (Timotel Hotel) for the night. The room was very spacious. It can accommodate up to 4 people.

The next morning after breakfast, we took the ferry to Tioman and headed to our hotel, Berjaya Tioman, once we arrived at Tioman (which took about 3 hours). Before we began with our first dive, we had our lunch in the hotel. The food was super fantastic. I even thought that the appetizer was the main course.

On Saturday, we had 3 dives. Our first dive was at Pirate Reef, or also called DHL Reef (because it was sponsored by DHL). Second dive was at a further place, called Soyak. On these 2 dives, we basically just repeat our pool trainings, but this time, in sea water. I was quite nervous on these 2 dives, especially since my inflator/deflator was not working, so I had to inflate my BCD manually. I was quite lucky that I did not get hurt by anything, two of my friends get spiked by sea urchins. Fortunately, they were OK.

On our third dive, we have no more trainings and I was more relaxed. We dive at Renggis Island and look for creatures. Visibility was bad. However, we spotted a turtle. It was huge and it was posing on a coral asking me to take pictures of it. Unfortunately, I did not bring my Canon Powershot D10 camera underwater since its depth rating is only 10m and we were diving at around 15m. However, my dive instructor managed to take a snapshot of the turtle.

After the dive, we went back to the hotel and ate our buffet dinner. There were too many dishes to choose from the menu and I was greedy that I took almost everything. I was even too full to eat my dessert. After dinner, we went to take a walk outside. Basically, there was nothing much around at night and everything seemed so far from the hotel (typical of a resort), so we just bought bottles of water and went back to sleep.

The next day, we woke up very early in the morning to have our early dives. We only had 2 dives that day. First dive was at Renggis Island again. We were hoping to see new creatures and we did. We met a cuttlefish couple. My dive instructor took a picture of it. It was flashing/blinking, just like what we saw on TV. Second, and last, dive was at Soyak again. Just like at Renggis Island, we saw a cuttlefish again. Besides that, we also saw a single Great Barracuda. It was very huge and swimming very still above us. Quite an experience!

Our time was up and we finally headed back to Singapore. But a trip to Malaysia is not a trip if you did not buy and eat the infamous Ramli burger. So, we bought Ramli burgers near Mersing jetty while waiting for the cars to arrive and deliver us back to Singapore.

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