Total Nightmare

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Wow, have I got a story for you! Well, as most of you know from my last entry, yesterday night was our first Night Dive. I was pretty excited for it, after being convinced that the likelihood of being eaten by a shark or a barracuda was pretty much the same as in the day time- very unlikely. We got our equipment on yet again, received night lamps, were given a short briefing, and were on our way down. With diving, you get a buddy, so if anything were to go wrong, you always have your partner there to help you. So, Emily was my buddy and we were in a group of seven. The visibility was terrible, so I wasn’t so much looking at the fish as I was keeping my eye on Emily and trying to stay away from the sharp coral. About 7 minutes into the dive, another dive school, “Shark diving”, crossed paths with us, and I started following them. I soon realized that they weren’t my group, from their “shark diving” stickers on their tanks. One of the divers didn’t have a sticker, so I was sure that was Emily, but once I caught up to her, I realized it wasn’t her. I freaked out! I swam, found their instructor and tried to use the underwater sign language I had been taught to show him that I wasn’t his student and I had lost my buddy. He told me it was okay, and that he was swimming back down, and I was to swim up to the surface….on my own….in the dark. I did as he said, but started crying when that group swam away and I was all alone. This quiet whimpering immediately turned into balling, and I was sure I was ascending faster than the required 18m/minute. I didn’t care. I wanted to get to the top, and FAST, so I wouldn’t be some fish’s late night snack.

IN THE MEANTIME, Emily realized I was missing right away, and tried getting the teachers attention. One of the highlights of the night was going to be seeing a barracuda feeding on a small fish that we shone our lights on. When the teacher had the barracuda cornered, Emily came barreling through the group to tell our instructor that I was lost. She got a few angry looks from the students up front thinking she was trying to get a better look. The teacher thought Emily was scared and wanted to be her partner, so she told Emily to come with her, and started swimming. Emily was furious. She was crying at this point, and crying uses up much more air than usual, so she tried once again to get her point across to the teacher. Once she finally convinced the teacher that she was NOT okay, the teacher, Andrea, okayed it to swim up to the surface. They all surfaced, but by this point, I must have still been swimming with the shark group, so I was no where to be found. Emily explained to the teacher that I was lost, and I could be lying at the bottom of the ocean somewhere dead. The teacher told Emily I was probably swimming with another group, ad I was probably fine, and that they were all going to go back down. Emily was so angry that she just assumed I was okay, and said there was no way she was going back down.

On the other side of things, once I got to the surface it was pitch black, except for the stars in the sky, and the five other dive boat’s lights surrounding me. I had no idea which one was mine, so I looked for the ugliest one, and sure enough I had swam to the right one. Now this was about a 200m swim, and I was still crying, though I had calmed down a bit from reaching the surface. I tried shining my light on the boat, and getting the captains attention, but it took a while. When he finally came out, he was yelling at me in broken English. I asked him if my group was going to resurface and come get me. He pointed to where they were in the water, and I asked him again if they were going to resurface to come and get me. He walked away, and came back a minute later. He told me my dive was over, and helped me out of the water. I was so sad at this point, because I was really looking forward to this dive, and it had been over in 20 minutes rather than an hour. I sat on the boat crying by myself, until to my amazement, I heard a faint but screechy “HELP” in the water. A smile came to my face, as I recognized that this voice belonged to Emily. She was waving her lamp around like a fool, in the hope that she wouldn’t get hit by a boat. It was quite funny. She was relieved that I was already on the boat, and STILL ALIVE for that matter.

We laugh about the whole thing now, but at the time, it wasn’t funny at all! We are redoing our night dive tomorrow night, with our original instructor, Chris, and it will be just the two of us, so hopefully it will be a better experience.

This morning, we did our deep dive, which is descending to a depth of 30m. Emily and I were still a little shaken up from yesterday’s disaster, but this time we were in a group of four; Em, me, Jeff, and Jason, and we had our own instructor that was really good at keeping an eye on us. We saw a ton of fish, including angel fish, two baby eels, a creature that looked like a mixture of a lobster and a crab (our instructor didn’t even know exactly what it was), and some more barracuda. It was pretty fun, except for the fact that when we went up to the top of the boat after the dive, one of my flip flops flew off the boat, so I was only left with one (it was only a cheap old navy flip flop). I had to walk down the piping hot pier with only one flip flop. Lucky I brought an extra pair!

Well, looking at the bright side of things, whenever something bad happens here, we always have an entertaining entry for our travel blogs. Sorry if I’ve worried you, Ma and Pa, but if it wasn’t for all of our silly mishaps here, there would just be a whole bunch of boring entries to read each time I posted one. Hope you all enjoyed this one, and I’m sure I’ll have another good story for you shortly. Miss you all!

Marie 😊

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Comments

[LAURA]

HAHA
YES tthose are the kind of stories that I NEED!!! I couldn't stop laughing picturing you crying alone in the water..hahahha sorry i know its mean but I KNOW you'd laugh if I told you the same story happening to me! Keep those coming pleaseeee! haha well girls keep making the best of your trip! have fun and be safe