A bit of R&R…

Having finished the Recue diver course I was now free to relax for a few days and enjoy lots of diving without the need to study or perform exercises or drills. I took advantage of the opportunity to get out every opportunity I could and had some fantastic dives.
Some were quite challenging, it’s a great confidence booster having successfully completed a dive which at one time would have been far beyond your limits as a diver. On one trip in particular the current was quite strong which required getting to sea floor as quick as possible to avoid it, by the time I had raced to sea bed 30 metres down I was breathing heavily and had consumed a lot of oxygen from my tank. When diving you become particularly aware of your breath with a Darth Vader like amplification around each inhalation and exhalation due to mechanics of the regulator and the silence of the underwater environment, when relaxed this becomes a potentially meditative state where one can become fully focused developing the long, thin breaths which produce a very relaxed state in the body’s physiology. With this increased awareness you could imagine the sound that heavy, labored breathing would make, on the surface it is a simple matter of opening your mouth and increasing the volume of air taken in but in the ocean, since the diameter of the regulator is constant and you can open your mouth any wider to increase airflow, all you can do is breath faster so once I descended to the bottom I gently grabbed on to the reef while I caught my breath.
In strong currents there is a variety of marine life to observe which can otherwise be missed. Some sharks, for example, favour currents amongst over other conditions and in this dive the group were treated to spotting of black tip reef sharks cruising through the depths predatorily lording over the aquatic environment of which they are top of the food chain. Sharks are wonderful to watch, the many species that live around Sumatra are not predators to humans unlike the Great White Sharks which lurk in the cooler Southern Ocean particularly around Southern Australia and Africa. At first it is counter intuitive to move closer towards a shark but after a few sightings, when a guide brings his hand to his forehead to make the signal that he has seen a shark in the area, it is a race to get as close as you can to the creature before it moves off with a flick of its tail and is gone into the depths.
Navigating underwater is a skill unto itself. On the surface we travel along one plane, horizontally. We move along the surface of the Earth, rarely climbing or descending without the aid of a mechanical device or solid structure and very rarely at a speedy rate. When a diver is underwater they are continually moving up and down (as well as forward) as much as 30-40 metres in only a few minutes. This makes moving distances underwater akin to travelling in space, with the human body as your spaceship, with your forward motion controlled by your fins (and the current) and your ascending and descent controlled by your buoyancy (the level of air in your lungs versus the weights carried on your belt). This is a whole new skill to learn and experienced divers stand out by the way they effortlessly travel through the depths like a fish as opposed to beginners who flail about, knocking into reefs and coral while using their hands to paddle and steady themselves like an underwater ape.
The last few days have been spent this way, enjoying the diving but it has also been great to be paired with experienced divers when on trips meaning I can focus on the environment rather than solely on the safety of my buddy. Scuba Diving employs the buddy system when out on dives meaning that two divers are responsible for looking out for each other and ultimately a safer dive because there is more than just one Divemaster looking after each individual diver.
While I’ve been taking it easy, Ron has been diligently moving through his traineeship and assisting the instructors and guides with a lot of trips and looks set to finish his qualification around Christmas time. One of his major exams was a test of his swimming endurance where he was required to swim 400m in 12 minutes, he did this in the bay around Iboih village.
I thought this may be my first chance to rescue someone, with Ron being very short of breath and exhausted by the finish complaining of a strong current across in the water. Returning to the boat he was sullen and inconsolable and spent the next 3 days sulking and complaining about currents under his breath feeling as though the instructors had been unfair with him when setting his task.
At this point another week ended, it was almost time for me to begin my traineeship so I began swimming each morning our to the buoy and back so as not to suffer the same fate as Ron when it was time to do my swimming test later on in the month.