The Australia Chronicles (Day 6)

Boy that 0645 wakeup call comes early! Today we are scheduled to be part of the full dive schedule. We can dive 5 times if we wish! The only scheduled, training dives are at 0800, 1030 and 1900. We'll see how we feel!

Breakfast is your typical buffet type thing. Watery scrambled eggs, runny bacon (yum!), sausage, yogurt, fresh fruit, etc. Not the greatest, but it works! Feel a little less sea-sick this morning and eat heartily! At 0730 we begin our training dive briefing and at 0745 the certified divers get their breifing as to where we are, what's to see, etc. The boat moves locations around 0600 and 1100 each day, so things are constantly changing.

Everyone else is suited up and in the water. We are suited up and awaiting our instructor. Seems there was an incident with a diver last night. Not sure what the real scoop was, but this American woman jumped in for the night dive and like 5 minutes later, once everyone else had "gone deep" she shows up off the back of the boat and climbs out. Thought I heard her complaining of an inability to equalize her ears. If that was the case, then where's her dive-buddy??? Didn't think anything else about it until now.

Emma (one of the dive supervisors) comes over and says Jon is tied up momentarily but he'll be taking us out shortly, and for us not to feel unloved. We remove the BCD's and relax.

The 0800 divers are now starting to come back out of the water. Emma comes down and says that the cause of the delay is the American woman may be suffering from Decompression Sickness (DCS) and that John has been the one in constant communication with the shore doctors and that it would be best for Jon to stay with her. No worries, though (that's my favourite Aussie express - 'No worries, mate!') Gavin will take us out. Nevermind that Gavin just climbed out of the water after leading a 17 minute foray to 30 meters with an Advanced Class. He's gonna need some time to de-Nitrogen-ize himself. He checks his dive computer, and asks for 30 minutes.. No worries, mate! He suits up and takes us down. Here's the log entry:

Openwater Dive 3
Location: Norman Reef, Playground

18 meters, 30 minutes, 3 minute decompression safety stop at 5 meters. 12-16m visibility, surface air temperature 24-25 C, surface water temp 24 C, bottom water temp 24C. Time In: 0916, Time Out 0955. Air in: 210 Bar Air Out: 60 Bar. 12 lbs of lead weights.

Tasks Completed: Surface Swim w/ Compass, Underwater Compass Navigation, Free Descent, Fin-Pivots (buoyancy control), Partial and Full Mask Clearing.

Notes: Saw a Lionfish (those are real cool looking), some lovely little Cleaner Shrimp (these things will go into other fish's mouths and clean the other fish's teeth with it's antenae), more clown fish, a Stinging Hydroid and a Grey Reef Shark!!! The shark was the coolest thing on the dive. He hung around a just long enough for us to get a good look at him, but once we made the shark-signal toward the videographer, and the videographer moved in for some pictures, true to most shark behaviour, he cleared out of dodge! Probably 2 meters or so long. Gavin (the dive instructor on this dive), upon finding the cleaner shrimp, swam up to it, opened his mouth and in walked the cleaner shrimp, and as Gavin started to close his mouth, out walked the cleaner shrimp. Gavin's teeth were very well cleaned!

Pressure Group at end: K

Bottom Time to Date: 00:01:30

Ok - we are one dive away from being certifiable, er, I mean certified! We get back to the boat, dry off, log the dive and then we see Jon. They are now going to fly the lady off the reef. Someone mentioned that the helicopter ride will run like $8,000 and the medical care could top $20,000!!! Jon helps her in the small boat, and drives her out to this small platform. In flies the helicopter, it lands on the platform, they help her into it, helicopter takes off, Jon returns and says "ready to finish?" Never found out her status afterwards. Most of the crew didn't really believe she had DCS, but in this sport you can't be too careful! Nothing like a little dose of reality to drive home the point that you could be seriously injured if you take anything for granted or don't follow procedure!

Last dive involves our CESA's (Controlled Emergency Swimming Ascent). This is the second worst situation to be in. You're swimming along no deeper than 12m, your buddy is several meters away (out of reach, so to say) and you go to take a breath and it is a little difficult. You check your gauges and your air is about to run out. You probably won't make it to your buddy and his air so you have one option, take the last breath out of your tank and ascend. Slowly. While ascending you are trying to ascend at the wonderfully safe rate of 18m/s, but while doing so the air in your lungs is expanding, so to make sure your lungs don't rupture you need to be exhaling while ascending. So remember that air you breathed in? Time to exhale some of it on the way up. If all goes well, you didn't ascend too fast and you had plenty of air in your lungs for the 30 seconds or so it would take you to go up. That's the plan, and that's what we need to do.

(what's the worst situation to be in? - out of air as described above by below 12m depth. you're going up and your going up faster than you should. Most likely you'll be alive on the surface but now you get to experience the wonderful world of decompression sickness!)

Anyway, in our case things are "safe". First, we're not really out of air. Second, the instructor is on the other side of this drop-line to make sure a) you are exhaling "make the aaaahhh sound the whole way up" and b) make sure that you aren't going too up slow or going up too fast. He counts down from three, big breath on one and up you go. No big deal. Hit the surface, inflate your BCD manually (remember, you're out of air, you dumb bastard!), and wait on the surface for the rest of the class. Then we will descend to the bottom, do a mask removal, replace and clear and then we're certified PADI Open Water SCUBA divers!

Openwater Dive 4
Location: Norman Reef, Playground
Surface Interval: 00:00:55
Pressure Group at Start: C

16 meters, 28 minutes, 3 minute decompression safety stop at 5 meters. 12-16m visibility, surface air temperature 24-25 C, surface water temp 24 C, bottom water temp 24 C. Time In: 1050, Time Out 1125. Air in: 210 Bar Air Out: 80 Bar. 12 lbs of lead weights.

Tasks Completed: Full Mask Removal and Clearing, CESA

Notes: Saw several Sea Cucumbers, Christmas Tree Worms. Too many other things to identify / remember. The Christmas Tree worms are cool. They live in these rock-like things (hell, the could be large coral deposits, I have no idea). Anyway, they look blue. And they are all over these rocks. You go near the rock, wave your hand and poof! They disappear!. One at a time. It is wild! Faster than the blink-of-an-eye and they're gone! Incredible!

Pressure Group at end: O

Bottom Time to Date: 00:01:58

We are now PADI Open Water Divers and it's lunch-time! There was the resident underwater photographer / videographer running around and it's his job to film the open water students on their last two dives so there is a video of the ordeal. You can buy it if you wish, or not. Whatever. Well, he had just gotten the existing camera replaced and everything seemed ok. He came out of the water and began to setup and found out that nothing was recorded. Too bad, really because I had done a nice underwater somersault once certified! Oh well! Not sure I would have bought one, they were like $95 USD EACH! :-|

So we are learning two things, a) we need to learn more about how to get around and find our way back to the boat while underwater and b) we need to learn more about all the "stuff" down there. I should have bought a field guide or something. There are a lot of things I know now I saw, but at the time I had no idea what they were, other than cool looking fish, and even now I don't know exactly which species of fish I saw.

Oh, and another thing. The reefs don't look anything like what you see in the pictures, unless you have an artificial light with you. The reds go first, then I think the greens. I forget the progression but little colors disappear as you go deeper then eventually the blues go. This makes a lot of stuff seem "grey". I often chuckled at this while underwater since I am red-green colorblind anyway. I kept thinking to myself "welcome to my world, folks!"

That being said, it is still an absolutely amazing world down there. We'll get into more of that later.

We skipped the 1230 dive to rest (it's a lot of work this SCUBA diving thing!) and to get caught up on our course work. Andrew and I went out for the 1530 dive. Perhaps we should have stayed home.....

Dive 5 - Leisure
Location: Norman Reef, Clipper
Dive Buddy - Andrew (Tomoko took the dive off).
Surface Interval - 00:03:40
Pressure Group at Start: A

17 meters, 20 minutes, 3 minute decompression safety stop at 5 meters. 10-12m visibility, surface air temperature 24-25 C, surface water temp 24 C, bottom water temp 23 C. Time In: 1605, Time Out 1630. Air in: 200 Bar Air Out: 80 Bar. 12 lbs of lead weights.

Notes: Nothing worse than releasing novice divers out into the open water alone. We ignored / forgot rule number one of navigation; "Descend along the mooring line". The dive site basically had mooring blocks in the sand at 12m. We hopped in the water on the mooring line side went halfway to it and began the descent. The plan was supposed to be this: from the mooring blocks turn right. This should be 12m. You'll come to a large round coral formation where a lionfish has established residency. Keep moving towards the right and you'll come to a large coral wall / slope around 14-16m. This marks the black buoy you see off to the right there. Work your way along, up, over, around this and begin coming back to the mooring lines. Explore until around 70 bars of air remain, ascend along the mooring ropes, pause for 3 minutes at 5 meters and surface with 50 bars remaining (that's 1/4 tank). Look for a Giant Moray eel, etc.

Here's what we did, since we're idiots! We just went straight down and worked out way towards the buoy which represented the right edge of the dive site. Must have been caught in current or something because as we went down, there was no bottom. Checked the gauges and we were around 17m. Note we are waaaay off of where we should be!!! Stop the descent (the plan was 14-16m), come up a bit and try to get our bearings. We go left knowing that to the right of the line we were swimming along was deep water. Anyway so we swim around at 14m or so kind of in a box trying to find out where we are. After awhile, we figured we would surface to see where the boat was. We go up, make our 5m stop and pop up......way out on the starboard side off the bow! (we jumped in on port-side stern !!!!). We signalled the boat we were ok (a bit confused, however!) and began a nice long surface swim. Not too long, about 5 minutes or so. In the meantime we saw a stingray swimming along the bottom, which was kinda cool.

You can bet we won't make that mistake again!!!

Pressure Group at end: I

Bottom Time to Date: 00:02:18

Dinner was served and then we were going to dive in the dark! :-)

Before I continue, it should be noted that my LEFT eye was now acting up! During the last dive it felt like a lot of pressure was on it. May have been caused by the mask-equalizations I did to prevent / relieve the mask-suck I was experiencing. As I was ascending the air I blew into the mask to equalize was probably expanding and not clearing. Vision wasn't blurry, just that the left eye was irritated. Applied my eye drops, things improved and prepared for the night dive.

Dive 6 - Advanced / Night
Location: Norman Reef, Clipper
Surface Interval - 00:02:50
Pressure Group at Start: A

15 meters, 31 minutes, 3 minute decompression safety stop at 5 meters. NIGHT visibility, surface air temperature 24-25 C, surface water temp 24 C, bottom water temp 23 C. Time In: 1920, Time Out 1957. Air in: 200 Bar Air Out: 40 Bar. 12 lbs of lead weights.

Tasks Completed: Underwater Night Compass Navigation.

Notes: Most notable thing on this dive was it was FRICKIN' DARK!. They give you this tiny little light for free or you can pay $6.00 for a BIG light. Figured there would be plenty of big lights out there so I just took the little one. Should have taken the big one as the little one didn't sufficiently make things clear. No big deal, we had Jon's light which had to have been in the neighborhood of 2 billion candle power! No sharks on this dive. (last nights dive which we didn't participate in, brought a white tip reef shark to the group. This thing swam up and through Jon's legs. Freaked out some of the students!) There was one cool fish out there were were going to run into (and we did!). This thing is called a Giant Trevally. Very big fish. 2-3 feet long by 1.5 feet high. These things run around at night hunting reef fish (small little bait fish type things). If they are nearby and your torch lights up a reef fish, you can pretty much guarantee that in a blink of an eye, a Giant Trevally will streak out of nowhere (may come from behind and run into you on its way) and gobble up the fish! Pretty little reef fish, silver blur, reef fish gone. That's pretty neat, but Jon likes to even up the odds a bit. Just as the Trevally gets to the reef fish, he points the torch like 90 degrees away on the reef. The silly Trevally immediately breaks off pursuit of the reef fish (which I guess it can't see anymore) and goes where the light it pointed, which in this case was onto a reef wall. Smack! That's was the extent of us playing with the locals. Saw some small shrimps on the reef, but nothing else that really stood out. Next time, we need larger torches!

Left eye was really troublesome during the last 10 minutes of the dive. Not blurry, just enough to be annoying. Hurts when I blink, which is kinda hard to stop, ya know?

Pressure Group at End: M

Bottom Time to Date: 00:02:49

Back on board and somewhat dry. The sky was a crappy overcast, the wind was still blowing, the boat was still rocking so what to do? Break open the Victoria Bitters! Had a beer and then crashed around 9:30 PM. All this diving takes its toll it seems. There was a Japanese woman who had gotten her Open Water certification about a year ago. She logged her 100th dive that day! Wow! She was running around taking underwater photos with her Olympus digital camera. Many were very good, others were blurry. That's the rule of thumb they say. Take a lot, get a few good ones! By the time we left I think she had gotten up to 111 dives or so. She dove 5 times a day for a week!

I no longer know what day it is! This is great!

The schedule for Day 6: 30m (Deep) dive, Peak Performance Buoyancy dive, Leisure Dive, Underwater Navigation Dive, Night dive. We'll see how the eye holds up!