16 February 20:22

These past four days have been so intense that I can barely keep my eyes open at 19:00. Being tired has never meant anything before today, haha. I don’t recognize myself. But what four days it has been! First traveling to the other side of the world. Then two dives yesterday and three today, might have been a bit too much.

Our alarms went off at 5am this morning, we got takeaway breakfast at 5:30 and were at the dive center not more than five minutes later. The boats left at 6am, two going to Kimod Shoal, the feeding stations of the thresher sharks. The boat ride took about 45 minutes. I was a bit tired, but couldn’t manage to eat any breakfast. But it was all fine. It was still early. We geared up on the boat when we neared and when it was our turn to long stride in from the boat, I realized that my BCD was too big, the crew had accidently given me a M instead of XS, which was of course my responsibility to check right when we boarded. Oh well.

The first dive was our deep dive, we were going down to 30m and would do a couple of exercises down there. We hadn’t been down in the water before long before our instructor showed us the sign for shark. The first thresher shark was clearly visible, maybe 15-20m away. Can’t really say how big it was, but like all the other ones, probably a grown up one, 3-4m perhaps? It was so cool! And not scary at all. It looked so cute! Unfortunately, since this was a course dive, we weren’t allowed to bring any cameras so we have no photos from this dive. So if you can’t wait to see our photos, google it for now, they look funny and majestic at the same time with their long fins. Their eyes are so big and cartoon-y, they always swim with their mouths open.

The first exercise was to write on the board what color we saw on a scale, just so we would be aware of color distortions at that depth. Then we pointed at the board and right number sequence and touched our nose to show that we didn’t have oxygen narcosis. While we were down there, a couple of sharks passively swam past and it was just so cool! We had dived off a reef wall and had a 200 m drop below us. It was definitely dark, even in 40+m visibility. Light disappears fast. I thought it was a little bit harder to breathe down there, but it felt normal fairly fast. Being down at that depth was more scary than seeing the sharks, for sure!

The rest of the dive was just cruising around until we “ran out” of air. At 70 bar, we started swimming towards the mooring line to make our 5m 3min stop and by the time we got there, I had only 50 bar, which is the reserve. I actually got a little bit panicked, even if I knew it was only 3 minutes until I could surface, I felt like the air was running out. But of course, that was only my brain playing tricks on me. But scary nonetheless. And it didn’t help that we were so many divers at the same time on that mooring line making our safety stop in quite the current.

We surfaced and swam to our boat and when I came aboard, I was so exhausted and didn’t feel like diving any more. And we had two more! But that feeling changed after the second dive!

During the surface interval, some people saw a thresher shark jumping. Apparently they do that and can jump pretty high! I missed it and only saw the splash afterward. BUT, right before we got back to Malapascua, I saw an eagle ray jumping out of the water. That was so cool!

The second dive was a “drift dive” so we practiced the negative descent, when you enter the water without air in your BCD so you sink directly to get away from the current on the surface. The current wasn’t so bad today, but we still did everything like it was. Compared to our first dive on Gili Trawangan (Halik’s Reef), this was like a fun dive. Halik’s reef was STRONG current where you just drifted with the current.

A course dive among thresher sharks at 20m was incredible! It might have been the best dive we’ve ever done! I think I lost count of the sharks after around 6. And that was early into the dive. Many were probably the same ones, but still. They just casually swam around all of us divers, looking goofy and cute. I had one fairly big one swimming straight towards me but steering off course quickly like 3-4m in front of me. It’s incredible how fast they are and how clumsy we are underwater. SO WOW! After forty-something minutes of a very pleasant dive and countless thresher sharks, it was time to end the dive. WOW!

I felt better on the boat but still not in the mood to eat. Although the third dive didn’t feel like an impossibility. We had time to eat lunch at Angelina’s again. After not feeling like eating anything at all, that tagliatelle ragu did seem rather alluring.

At 13:30, we met up at the dive center for a briefing of the last dive of this advanced open water certification: the underwater navigational dive. I was dreading this the most. Navigating underwater with a compass. I failed to understand on land (although I completely understand how a compass works and how to think when swimming a square). But it turned out to be easy underwater. I did surprisingly well and almost made a perfect square (if only my visual reference navigation was a little bit better and I didn’t swim towards the wrong rock formation to end the square, haha).

A bit of chilling at the hotel, taking pictures of the sunset from our balcony and then went to Kokay Maldites Beach Resort for dinner. Same beach as our other favorite restaurant. It seems like that’s where most restaurants are.