Our wake up call this morning was at 07:30am, and by 08:10am we were in the water and starting our 3rd instructed dive – Deep Dive. We were going to descend to 30 metres, and do a number of different tests on the sea bed to know how to spot nitrogen narcosis, and also the learn the effect depth has on colour. It was very peaceful on the bottom, and the first colour to disappear at depth was red…a tomato our dive master took down looked green.
As we started our ascent we saw a ornate spiny lobster hiding in the corals, and the name of this site (Coral Gardens) did what it said on the tin…the coral was stunning, and the fish abundant. We both passed the deep dive, and were signed off back on the boat once we had finished our hearty breakfast of eggs and bacon.
Dive number 2 of the day was for our 4th component of the course (unguided); Nicola did Underwater Naturalist and Ben did Underwater Photography. Basically Nicola had to spot 4 vertebrates, 4 invertebrates and one symbiotic relationship. Ben had to take photographs underwater following the things we had learnt from the text book course work we had done.
So, with Nicola as the spotter and Ben as the underwater paparazzi, we descended to 17.4 metres. One of Ben’s favourite shots was of the pink anemone fish (above), or ‘Nemo’ as some of you may like to call him! Nicola liked the purple sea squirt (below).
The symbiotic relationship was the whitespotted puffer fish with the cleaner wrasse (below). We also saw 5 giant clams (below right).
And, our favourite coral, the mushroom leather coral was beautiful! And, our friend the maori wrasse had returned to pose for a photo. Needless to say we both passed at our respective course choices.
Dive 3 of the day was the 5th and final part of our course, and Ben had decided to do Underwater Naturalist, and Nicola Underwater Photography. So, at 15:12 we jumped in and as we had perfected our breathing technique made our air last for 53 minutes! The new dive site (Flynn’s Reef Gordan’s Mooring) was another great site for spotting and photographing.
Our highlight of the dive however was getting the chance to swim with a huge green turtle, it was truly a magical moment for both of us. We also found out after the dive that we had passed the final component…so we are now both qualified advanced open water deep sea divers!
The final dive of the day was after dinner at 19:00, our first unguided night dive AND before we jumped in we spotted 3 grey reef sharks off the back of the boat…this was going to be a test of nerves! It was slightly more nerve wracking going down on our own, but Nicola as designated navigator took us round the coral formations and back to the boat within the 30 minute dive limit. Ben was designated photographer, and did a cracking job of catching the expression on Nicola’s face as she realised a large grey reef shark was swimming past her left arm!
The picture of the shark is slightly blurred (they move VERY quick). As we hung on to the 5 metre bar under the boat waiting for our decompression limit to be reached we felt in awe of these huge and graceful creatures that were circling us. It was definitely 5 minutes neither of us will forget in a hurry…swimming with the sharks was truly amazing.
We will try and put the video Ben took on the blog at some point…as it swam a couple of metres underneath us while he was filming.
Back on the boat we had pudding and then joined the crew and other divers for some ‘games’, finally getting to bed at 11pm…what a day!
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