I have the option to do the early morning dive with Freddie and the other German girl or sleep, but since Antoine was doing a morning dive for his class anyways I got up to go with them.
We get our gear on and jump into the water, something is wrong with the German girl and she doesn’t descent. She gets brought back to the boat, Freddie takes me to Lion Fish Rock, there are four lion fish. We also see another turtle.
Antoine’s first Padi advanced dive of the day was a deep dive to 24 meters where they did experiments and he saw a turtle eating sand.
We get breakfast on the boat after the first dive. After breakfast, Freddie finds me and tells me that we are finishing the dive alone, the other girl doesn’t make it. We see a shark. I pass it, I’m officially a licensed Open Water Diver.
Antoine went on a dive to learn how to direct yourself underwater using different techniques including a compass. The following dive just before lunch was called a boat dive. So the whole group put on their gear and hopped on to a small dinghy who brought us over to the reef so that we could swim all the way back to the main boat.
I decided to skip out on the next dive and take a long well-deserved nap. After Antoine finished his dive, he came back and napped as well.
After the nap and lunch, we do our first guided dive together! There was one other girl with our guide, and for some reason she kept ascending. But we got to be each other’s dive buddies and did each other’s buddy checks.
For this night dive, I get to go night diving, and Antoine signs up to go Flouro diving.
I jump into a shark-infested water, when they told us to jump in, all of us were like…uhhh…are you sure. But the sharks moved away pretty much as soon as the first person jumped in. The giant grouper was back. They gave each of us a flashlight, and an emergency flashlight. They also told us that there are these big black fish that use our lights to hunt smaller fish, so don’t keep our light on each fish too long, and that crustacean eyes will go red when the lights shine on them. Another tip was that if we want to keep sharks away, just shine the light in their eyes, they don’t like that. Once we descent, we see the black fish immediately. It’s pitch black. When you shine the light into cracks, you can see little red dots shine back at you. A few times, sharks came out of the corals from right under me. Close enough that I could almost touch it if I wanted to it.
While I was night diving, I could see Antoine’s group’s flouro lights, they were blue or purple.
Antoine’s fluoro diving was really cool, it started off with a briefing to talk about what we were going to do and how all the equipment worked (a filter for your mask and a UV light) as well as the plan of what were going to do. Once in the water we dove down amongst the sharks all the way down. Once at the reef we got really close and use the UV lights to light up the reef and see which corals would floress we moved amongst the reef slowly to really focus on the coral, it was hard to see any fish or sharks because the lights weren’t bright enough to illuminate far enough but seeing the coral was really close. At one point I turned down and saw a shark swimming less than a meter under me minding his own business. After about 30 mins we headed back up!