SPONSORED BY: Nettinho e Keite, Biriba e Dre, Maracy e Aparicio, Claire and Andrew Foreman, Alf and Sarah and my Nan!
It was yet another gorgeous day, we had mango for breakfast on the way to school and then stuffed down the muffins once we arrived not realising that we wouldn't have the knowledge review time to digest them, we were going straight into the water. I felt a fair bit queasy and on a couple of occasions I thought I was about to see my breakfast again. We did Confined Water 4 and I managed to keep my breakfast down, thank God, I don't want to experience the sensation of vomiting under water. We raced through the skills coming out of the water fairly early, our hovering a vast improvement on recent days – it's hard to believe we are the same students as two days ago.
We had a good long lunch, this time with Matt, back at the same falafel joint – damn his falafels were good. Despite the long lunch we were back to the grind before long, this time to do Open Water 2. What an amazing dive, we started out with a couple of skills including the CESA which is a Controlled Emergency Swimming Ascent, I found it quite difficult going too slow instead of too fast and almost running out of air but I made it to the surface and then the fun started. We swam round Lighthouse which was full of coral swimming with plant life, we stayed fairly near the bottom which was the same golden sand as the rest of the beach, it was so amazing to be there and just be able to watch the little fish swim in shoals around coral pinnacles, one thing that was super cool was the Red Sea anemonefish which look very similar to Clownfish (Nemo) and live in these yellow/green anemones darting in and out, one of them was a little curious and followed my movements with it's eyes while I hovered watching it, it was such an amazing feeling I felt like introducing myself – if only I could speak fish. Floating around in the sea were shoals of tiny blue and tinier silver fish, just near the surfaces, all with stunning group instinct moving like one organism instead of hundreds of individuals. We also saw ginger/red fish, a unicornfish, spiderfish, lionfish and big lipped clams nestled in salad coral and loads more especially butterflyfish.
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| From 10 Dahab |
It was magnificent, Djalma made a video and when I managed to prise the camera off him I took some photos, it being really difficult to stay still and not just get a streaky blue picture, my hovering went out the window and I had to take big breaths to raise myself up or exhale deeply for the opposite, it was just incredible and made all the mask flooding worth it.
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| From 10 Dahab |
We had to get out of the sea eventually and after rinsing our gear and putting it away we went up to the classroom for some theory – back to the RDP, uuurgh, I was still completely unable to get it. We finished the lesson and went with Matt to Funny Mummy where a Scottish friend of his was visiting, Clare – really nice and very funny. The restaurant was right on the seafront, all the seats were on the floor with an abundance of cushions to make it comfortable and decorated with Dahab chic – old water bottled with the top cut off, filled part way with sand and a candle in the middle – surprisingly beautiful. We stayed there for a good while, drinking tea or beer and eating. The walk back to Matt's was long, right across the other side of town but we made it – eventually and when we did get back went straight to bed for some much needed sleep.
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| From 10 Dahab |
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