15 February 19:37

We gave ourselves no time to rest for this and I’m starting to think that our 30 year old bodies can’t really handle it. It feels unfamiliar. But we survived today. I wonder how tomorrow will go. Or the day after tomorrow.

We woke up to clear blue sky and had the most amazing view from our balcony. Breakfast was okay, but we had to stress it through to make it to the dive center at 8am. It was already 26C this morning and I started to question bringing a 5mm wetsuit. I was afraid that we would get heatstroke from just going to the dive sites.

The Thresher Shark Divers PADI dive center lies approximately 1 minute walk from the hotel. Super convenient. As usual when diving, we signed so many papers and met with our fellow course taker from China. We were told that we were going to do to two dives straight after each other; Peak Performance Boyancy at Laplight dive site and Underwater Naturalist at Dakit-Dakit. A refresher dive was included in the first one where we filled our masks with water and cleared it but also when we lost our regulator and how to find it and start breathing again. Easy peasy! That was the one part our instructor was impressed with. We wanted to do the refresher part but once in the water it felt so natural again. We were a bit spoiled at Blue Marlin on Gili Trawangan though where the Fun Dives were all prepared by the staff, so coming to this advanced course and not really knowing how to set up the gear was embarrassing. But we are alive so we did everything correctly at least, haha!

At the briefing before boarding the tiny boat, we got to know what we were going to do, and it felt easy enough. I understand why an advanced course starts with the buoyancy part, but buoyancy is tough, especially when you are performing specific tasks and trying to do it expertly. We all did okay, but I had some serious issues with staying neutrally buoyant vertically upside down. I just flew back up to the surface. No controlled breathing could have been stronger than that force. I am guessing that my new, extremely buoyant wetsuit had something to do with it. I don’t know how many times I had to retry. After a while, the instructor picked up another weight and put on my cylinder. It was better, but I still floated to the top at the end of the minute, Oh well.

Mikael did great on all parts except swimming through the square without touching. It’s hard to know if you’re completely horizontal or not. We did 4 one minute buoyancy positions: horizontal, vertical upright, vertical facing down and buddha. I don’t know how people manages the last one with the fins trying to reach the surface all the time. But I passed somehow, I think. Then was the square we had to swim through without touching and pushing things off the bottom with our regulator by controlling our breaths. It was a frustrating first dive.

The next dive was straight after but at another dive site. A bit bumpy but not too bad. Once we were there we were changing tubes to new ones and I started feeling really bad. I have had some seriously bad boat trips, but I’ve never thrown up before. I know that it feels better once you’re in the water, but I didn’t really want to rush getting that regulator in my mouth. Ugh! But once we were down it was all good.

Underwater Naturalists is supposed to make us aware of what we are diving with, so it was basically just a fun dive at Dakit-Dakit sanctuary with artificial reefs where the instructor pointed at things and we were supposed to tell her if it was a plant, vertebrae or invertebrates. Easy enough once you got the hang of it. We saw some really cool things! Huge bat fish, stone fish, can fish (I think? It looked like a box and swam backwards). I don’t know the words for everything, but there were lots of cool small things. Except the starfish, they were huge! Both blue ones but also light brown ones with white spots.

On this dive, it started to get cold. Even with the 5mm full wetsuit. It was not too bad, but I felt sorry for Tina who only had a 2,5mm shorty. Poor woman!

After the dive I felt so tired. I love diving. But today was rough! My mask was too tight and I got a piercing headache on the leftside of my forehead, I threw up, all the heavy gear, after not sleeping too well in a room that was way too much AC’d. Not too much good food eaten in the past days.

We asked for advice for lunch and went to an Italian restaurant, easy food. And super good! Angelina’s right on the “main” beach where the ferry comes through. Quickly though, because we had to be back at the dive center for the dry part of the Nitrox course where we learn how to analyze and dive with higher concentrations of oxygen. It basically lowers the risk of nitrogen toxicity, but you have to be super aware of how deep you can go with different percentages of oxygen. With our dive computers it won’t be hard. But it’s good to know why we have these limitations and what could happen.

It started raining after that, the blue sky gone and we went back to the hotel for a nap before heading out to dinner. We woke up, feeling weird and decided to stay in and skip dinner. Filled out our dive logs and will now go to bed. Because at 6am, the boat leaves tomorrow morning for two dives with sharks!