Kimud Shoal and night dive at Evo Reef

Posted on Friday, 8 March 2024, 14:29 by Alexandra

22 February 22:00

Our last dive on Malapascua has come and gone. And what a great day of diving it has been!

The day started with our alarms going off at 4am because the boat to Kimud Shoal left at 5am. It was extremely low tide this morning so we had to walk a fair bit out to reach the small boat that would take us to the bigger one. The night sky was all clear and the stars were on such display. Magical start of the day. It then got better when we sailed into the sunrise and watched a big pod of dolphins jumping. Just magical!

We were first at the divesite, the waters were so calm, the visibility a refresh sight after yesterday’s extremely bad visibility at Deep Rock. Not too many thresher sharks at first, and the same goes for divers. But at the second dive, there were many more of both. I had some sharks swimming real close to me this time. It was incredible and I got it all on video! Unfortunately on my GoPro Hero 4, which is ancient compared to Mikaels’s DJI Osmo Action 4. I’m still excited to see the results when we have time to go through it all (once we get back home).

During this dive, we also saw a swimming moray (they usually only sit in their holes gaping at people) and huge schools of fish out in the blue. I actually kept looking out there to see if there was a whale shark casually swimming by, but no. That would have made a perfect day even perfecterer.

Moray half out of his hole swimming. That’s not something you see every day.

We were done with our two shark dives at 9:15 and headed back to the island. Great, so much more time to chill before the third dive of the day.

During our surface interval, Mikael and I found an Australian girl from Perth who joined us at Blanco Beach Resort where she is staying for some snorkeling. We hung out the full day, had aloe massages together, had lunch, went snorkeling. It was really great. On the southwest point of the island, there is a marine protected area where no boats are allowed, strict rules of not standing, just snorkeling around. And what’s so cool about this place (the corals weren’t that impressive if you compare to what we’ve seen diving) is who you can snorkel with: baby black-tipped reef sharks! We saw so many and at the end of our snorkeling trip, I had four at the same time in front of me. Adorable!

Something that’s not as adorable was the huge sea snake we also saw. Terrified fascination kept me going closer for that money shot, but shit, I was scared! I know they’re deadly but also have super tiny mouths and teeth so far back that that can’t really bite you. But not having a wetsuit on that would definitely get the best out of a potential bite was scary. We survived though!

Sea snake!

Baby sharks:

At 17:00 we were back at the dive center and geared up for our very first nightdive. We went to Evo Reef, many artificial reefs. There was a thresher shark structure, some other sunken things and sure enough, many things came to life during the night. But since it was our first night dive, we were more focused on doing everything right and not losing each other, rather than looking at macro things. We did however see some cool things like a big crab, lionfish, moray eel, mandarin (not sure exactly but I think I might have seen them while trying to get my head in between the other 5 divers who were also looking at the same time) and many other things like swarming fish, mating fish, sea stars as usual, sea urchins.

We started the dive as the sun was setting so at first, we didn’t use the torches. Eventually though, the sun disappeared and it grew darker and darker. The visibility was okay, but it was hard to keep track of who belonged to our group since there were so many other divers. I think that was great though, because even if it obviously was dark all around, you didn’t feel alone and isolated and closed in. That was what I had been afraid of, feeling claustrophobic. But it was fine. It was a very different experience diving when it was dark, for sure. But not sure if that is something I want to do a lot of in the future. It was cool to have tried and it might get cooler with time and experience, but right now I feel fine with diving during the day with great visibility (I miss Gili T where all the dives had 50+ m visibility, we really took that for granted).

One cool crab, that was completely oval.

These night dive pictures are just to show you how hard it is to take pictures while night diving, haha!

Super tired, but not very hungry, the three of us went to dinner at the next door restaurant, Villa Potenciana. Mikael and I shared the tacco pizza and Emma told us about diving in Western Australia. They have hammerheads there! And sea lions, and a ton of other cool things. Apparently it’s not just the Great Barrier Reef that has nice diving (I’ve also actually heard that the Great Barrier Reef is kinda overrated). One day, I’m gonna dive both coasts! We also heard this morning that you can dive with hammerheads outside of Tokyo.

What a great day! But we are so exhausted now. Diving in itself is not too bad. But all the fuss around it is really hard! But it is so worth it! In total, we did 14 dives each during this stay. I am now up to 31 logged dives, Mikael at 27 and I more than doubled my accumulated divetime. Great job!

Monad and Kimud Shoal

Posted on Saturday, 24 February 2024, 13:31 by Alexandra

18 February 18:23

A day of rest did wonders, because three dives today was no biggie at all! The boat left at 6am today, we got assigned a Divemaster who led us through one dive at Monad Shoal and two at Kimud Shoal. The focus of today was sharks! At Monad, it is possible to see tiger sharks, which apparently is the most aggressive of all sharks (I thought it was bull, but no). Unfortunately, we finished that dive only having seen a white tipped reef shark. We saw a shark at three separate times but I’m pretty sure it was the same. One scary thing that happened was that my air valve was not open fully, so halfway into the dive, I actually couldn’t get enough air, but the divemaster helped me in one second and just like that, my 20 bar turned to 110. That was a bit scary! Seeing the shark, not at all! It was only like 1,5m maybe? But it was swimming around very fast.

Other than the shark, we didn’t get to see so much there. Monad Shoal is basically a big sunken island and it’s mostly sand bottom. Of course, there are a bunch of beautiful fish, starfish but it’s the big things that are really cool. We sat down on the bottom every now and then and looked out towards the blue at 22m or something, but the tiger never came. Such shame! But we have a week left, we will have more chances of seeing it!

Our next stop was Kimud Shaol. The thresher shark haven! No stress getting in, which was nice for once. The first dive, we saw a lot of sharks. Maybe not as many as two days ago and the visibility was slightly worse. But it is still so cool seeing them swimming around with their long tails. They truly are something to see! The second dive was only 48 minutes long, compared to the first one of 55 and when Mikael and I were the first two of our group of six to ascend to the surface, the crew on the closest boat looked at me and asked if I was okay. Yes, of course, why wouldn’t I be? Then they told me I was bleeding. And I really was, like a lot! I’m not sure what happened, but it must have been something with my sinuses. And the more I thought about it, I realized that it might have been something with the long stride off the boat, I think my mask went up hard on my nose when I jumped in. So for the next dive at Kimud, the third of the day, I was told to do a spin jump, it was much better and not as hard on the mask. No blood! Good thing there are only thresher sharks at Kimud, hehe!

On the third dive we didn’t see as many sharks at all. Maybe only like 10? So we focused on the small critters. The fish are so colorful and if you look closely at the soft corals, there can be so many tiny fishes there. We saw a baby moray, some nudibranchs, stonefish, pufferfish, some really cool anemones. In general, a really cool dive as well. But we were a bit disappointed that the whale shark from yesterday was nowhere to be seen today. That would have been epic!

We did see some other cool stuff on the surface though. Get ready for this: how about a big flock of dolphins jumping straight towards our boat while we were going to the first dive site? Or a blue marlin casually hanging out by the surface when we were chilling and waiting for a proper surface interval before doing our first dive at the second dive site? Or jumping thresher sharks while waiting for our third dive while having an amazing bbq onboard? Or flyfish while going back to the island? So many jumping animals, haha! And then there was the jumping eagle ray two days ago.

One, not so awesome thing, is that the sunburn from yesterday, is infinitely worse today. My face is almost purple and my hands are completely destroyed. They are swollen, they burn intensely and as soon as I move them, it feels like my skin is on fire and about to crack. The hotel receptionist and her Swedish boyfriend who lives here permanently and works from home, are so kind though, helping me mix fresh aloe to heal and trying to find out what we can do about it. The service here at Blue Coral is truly amazing! Let’s hope it is true that the second day of a sunburn is the worst and that tomorrow will be better, otherwise I’m not sure I really look forward to spending a day on the boat, diving at Gato Island but not being able to use my hands. Like just imagine squeezing them through that tight wetsuit? Or handling your gear? Or gearing up? It stings just thinking about it. Mikael also burned his hands, but not as bad as me fortunately. We will see how it goes. With a burn this bad, I’m not sure the second day is the worst…

THRESHER SHARKS / Day two of AOW

Posted on Tuesday, 20 February 2024, 14:27 by Alexandra

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.

Gili T day 4: More diving

Posted on Friday, 7 October 2022, 22:46 by Alexandra

Bali Belly is apparently a common thing and it’s still ongoing for me. But much better today. Now it’s basically just cramps, which is pretty bad in itself, but it could be a lot worse I guess.

This morning was the best so far. The view from our breakfast was incredible, the sky was almost clear and it was really warm at 7 already.

I decided that my stomach was well enough for a dive and we tried the 9am fun dive with Blue Marlin today to Sharkpoint. We had the same divemaster Rahman but got another couple joining us, a 30-year old pair from Australia. We saw the same baby sharks as the other day under the rock but today there were countless other divers (last time it was just the three of us), so it took away some of the amazement. But it was cute that three of the sharks were sleeping all lined up next to each other.

We also saw a couple of morays, one of which were swimming. A blue-spotted stingray. A tiny tiny nudibranch and of course a ton of tropical fishes and corals. I saw no turtles on this dive, first dive here I didn’t see any.

On the way back, my stomach was acting up a bit, but after lunch, we relaxed by the pool for a bit and then went to the second dive today at 14. On Friday’s there’s only two dives instead of three because of the longer prayer from the Mosque.

The second dive today was Bounty Wreck and we were ready for revansch after last time when we had technical issues with my BCD being too big and the current. I don’t think we can call it a rematch yet. This was a stressful dive in other ways but I think everything worked out fine.

So for this dive we had an elder Dutch couple (50 maybe?) Joining us and Rahman. They said they had around 50-60 dives, which would make them fairly experienced. We descended and started the dive as usual but after around half, just when I’m about to swim up to three big turtles lying next to each other on the ground, I see Rahman shoot back and I turn around and see Mikael swimming towards me and behind him, halfway up to the surface is a bubbly mess of one of our diving buddies. Her husband was further down, trying to get Rahman to help him help his wife who kept ascending. For those of you who don’t dive, that’s bad! You can’t get up that quickly from 18m depth without doing a safety stop of 3 minutes on 5m depth. The risk of decompression sickness is much higher if you don’t make the stop. Mikael and I ascended a bit but stayed at least at 10m and let Rahman handle the situation. Eventually she came back down and the dive continued. She signaled she was fine. So we descended again and continued.

We were at the wreck itself for only a few minutes, much air was lost and we needed to end the dive.

Later, she seemed fine and told us that she couldn’t deflate her BCD when trying to maintain her boyancy under water. I hope she didn’t get decompression sickness. Because that’s bad!

When we all surfaced, I panicked a little when I saw Mikael’s face. He had blood all over his cheek. And when he removed his mask, his face was so bloody!! His sinuses had burst while descending after the woman came down from her “accident”. He could feel it then, something warm filling his mask, but he thought is was mucus. So he did half of the dive with a mask full of blood. I’m glad that he had a mask with UV protected glass. I would have freaked out underwater if I saw his bloody face. We would have had to ended the dive. Apparently it’s not too uncommon for this to happen. But it looked gruesome!

After the dive, we went to the hotel, relaxed for a short bit and got ready for dinner. We met up with the Australians and had dinner at Pearl. It was a very nice evening. And in the background, over Lombok, there was an ongoing massive thunderstorm the whole evening so we had lightning lighting up the sky all the time. It was beautiful.

Dive #5 – La Jolla Cove Sea Caves

Posted on Thursday, 18 June 2015, 2:52 by Alexandra

This post used to contain pictures, but due to new storage limitations from WordPress, I had to fix the problem and decided to create a new blog that works as an archive for all the posts from my two years in California. This full post can be found here.

This whole day has been a happy one just because of one one-hour long dive in La Jolla. The conditions were perfect so I could choose to either to the kelp forest or the cave dive. I chose the cave and am so happy I did so. It was incredible and amazing and awesome and I thought it was such a great time that as soon as I got home, I booked another tour (to do the kelp forest) on Friday. Scuba diving is the best thing ever and I regret not getting my certification earlier.

I got to La Jolla Cove at 8am this morning, met with the instructor who would give me a private tour along the coastline right under the cliffs where sea lions hang out. In the beginning of the dive we saw lots of tuna crabs. Then we descended after hiking out a little bit. My regulator this time was so much easier to breathe through that I didn’t even think about my breathing at all, like I did during all my other dives up in SLO. There was a lot of sea grass in a dark red color and bright green. It was very pretty. And through it swam tons of big orange fish, the California state fish: Garibaldi Calico Bass (real name is Hypsypops Rubicundus). The visibility was 15-20ft and that was good enough for me, I could see plenty and I loved the view down there. We never went deeper down than 20ft which was good for a first dive. Water temp was just under 60F at the bottom and around 60F at the surface. But with a 7mm wetsuit I didn’t get cold. During the dive he showed me plenty of stuff, like lobsters and abalone’s. They are apparently very very expensive and their dead shell is very very pretty. We also saw sea lions once we got to the cave. We had just surfaces inside it when I hear him say to quickly look behind me. I panicked a little for a second and then went under water and saw a huge, 800lb, sea lion swimming a few feet away from me. Haha, crazy! There was also a sea lion lying on one of the cliffs in there. Oh right, speaking of sea lions, I accidently resurfaced right before going in the cave. It’s hard with the buoyancy, it shouldn’t be, but it happened, I got too positive and surfaced. And once I was above the surface I heard the screech of sea lions, looked up at the cliff right above me and saw a lot of big sea lions lying there watching me. Haha! They are kinda intimidating honestly.

We swam around inside the cave for a bit, then slowly headed back to the beach. Another thing we saw was a tiny sleeping horned shark. It wasn’t bigger than a feet and was sleeping inside a crevice well-hidden. But the instructors keen eyes found it. He has over 10,000 dives and is very experienced and I felt very safe diving with him.

We had a total of 63 minutes under water, which he said was very impressive for a beginner. Normally that dive was 45 minutes. I guess I am a natural, haha! Jk, but he said that I was very calm and didn’t seem like a beginner, and that felt really good to hear since I thought I was gonna die on dive #1 and #2 in Montaña de Oro.

Now I have 144 minutes under water, more than two hours, yay!

The way up to the truck was hard, the scuba equipment is heavy and walking up stairs with it was not fun, haha! We talked for a bit afterward, and I filled in my log book, got a stamp and then drove home. If anyone ever goes to San Diego to scuba dive, find Scuba San Diego Inc! $140 for one dive with all the equipment rented, $205 for two tanks. I am glad I didn’t do two dives, I would have been too tired. And now I have something to look forward to on Friday!

When I came home I started looking at the pictures. They turned out pretty good, but the videos were the best. And since none of the pictures from the cave and forward were damaged somehow, I decided to go through all the videos and take screenshots, and with the program VideoPad they turned out amazing! So today there are a lot of pictures in the blog.

Later in the afternoon I pretended to be an au pair again and picked up Nicki, who I hung out with in San Francisco during spring break with Helena. We went to La Jolla Westfield UTC to do some shopping. I bought a pair of flip flops and lots of underwear from VS. Mine are falling apart and I don’t know when I will get the chance to buy new ones next time. Good thing they don’t take space or weight from my suitcases. I still have weight left I think. But I am gonna save money if I am about to pay tuition to Cal Poly or SDSU next fall.

Wow, it is almost 3am… I should probably go to bed now, haha! It has been a fantastic day and I can’t wait for Friday when I am going to see the kelp forest and go down to 40ft. I have never been below 25, so that will be cool!

Here are Rod Watkins’ pictures from the dive today. He was fast at uploading them to Facebook.

California’s state fish and an abalone. Tuna crab. 800lb sea lion inside the cave. Swimming in to the cave. North entrance, to Coast Blvd. South entrance to the ocean. Sea lion resting. Inside the cave.

Waves hitting the razor reef.Extremely happy after a very successful dive :).

Here are my pictures from my gopro:

Red, green, orange. Lobster. This is a funny one. I was watching the videos tonight and I saw this sea lion swimming right above us. I had no idea this happened when we were out there, haha! Alive abalone. Beautiful colors. This is what I faced when I accidentally surfaced, haha! The cave. This is me filming in the cave, the first picture on the upper left corner shows the sea lion swimming right next to me! And this sea lion decided to swim right in front of us when we were outside of the cave.