More Diving!!!
PADI Advanced - Day 1

Dive 1
On the advanced course, I get 6 more dives and do such stuff as Underwater Navigation, Peak Performance Buoyancy, Multi-Level Computer, Underwater Photography, Underwater Naturalist and Deep Diving...
All good fun!

The others coming up after our first dive!
(Didn't take the camera down with me on this dive)

Poor Elvira, like all of us, grabbed the mooring line and got lacerated hands!  Hers seemed to be worse than anyone else's!

Tea...  And a telling off for most of the others as they fluffed one of the exercises...

On the next dive, I forgot to take my camera down!!!  Therefore all the fishes came out to play...  sod's law!

We headed back to dry land...

This was our boat...

When filling out my log book and learning how to use The Wheel... the thing to  work out your multi-level dive profile, I spotted Martin here, The Praying Mantis!
Never go this close to a praying mantis before, and he loved my camera for some reason... he kept jumping onto it!  This frightens the shit out of you the first time, when you didn't realise the buggers could jump at all!!!
So over the next hour or so, I took 82 photos...  and a couple of video clips!!!  Here's the in focus highlights.

PADI Advanced - Day 2

Dive 3

PADI Advanced - Day 3

Rainbow!!!

Dive 1

This dive was the deep dive... Yippee!!!  This is where we get to go down to 30m, our open water limit was 18.
We had to swim quite a way against a current to get to where the bottom depth was 30m... and we seemed to go there quite quickly!!!  got a little bit knackered.

Wow! 29.1m !!!  Almost 30, and unfortunately no sign of Nitrogen Narcosis.. :-( ...It supposedly happens about 30ish meters and you get the feeling and behaviour of being pissed... it's completely harmless and disappears when you reduce you depth, but can be dangerous if you start doing stupid things, like, as past student did, as told by our instructor, offer you regulator to a big fish... cos fish need breath too yeah!!  Hmmm.  Best you keep your regulator to yourself I reckon!!!

So we swam back and surfaced (after our safety stop) to where we thought the boat could be... but the current had taken us way off course...  when we surfaced, we were bloody miles away from the boat!  It was just a little white spec on the horizon and it and we were bobbing up and down in the swell quite a lot, so it kept disappearing from site...  Wow, this is fun!!!?  Our instructor, Mike, said that we should surface swim over to it...  but Mike, it's a bloody long way!!!  ...So we started swimming over to it with our snorkels in and we were getting nowhere...  The current was quite strong and it was tough going, I was getting quite tired...  THEN...  A bloody wave crashed over me, filling my snorkel, which I proceeded to breath right in...  Great!  A lung full of seawater!!!  Mmmm, Just what I needed!!!  That almost killed me!  After lots and lots of coughing and spluttering, I cleared my lungs but was absolutely knackered now...  Snorkels do not allow for heavy breathing too much and trying to swim when I was this knackered was a nightmare...  so threw in the towel and decided to tell the others that I needed a rest...  Luckily, Ben was behind me an he offered to drag me over to the others who had now stopped...  Ben could now do the 'Tired Diver Tow' for real... one of the skills we were all taught...  Thanks Ben!!!
Mike, our instructor had stopped and had decided that we were getting absolutely nowhere in this current, so we should stop and signal to the boat to come and pick us up...  this involved deploying the Safety Sausage!!!  It's a long 2m orange 100mm dia tube that we all have rolled up in our pockets on our BCD for times just like these...  it makes us quite visible at quite a distance, where we would normally be almost impossible to spot!
After a few minutes, the boat spotted us and we waited for it to come over...
When I got out, I was so relieved to be back on the boat!!!  Safe at last!!!
Phew!!!

This isn't red underwater... There's no red light at this depth cos the water absorbs it all... but my camera flash has it... so it shows up in it's true colours...

Our boat comes over and moors on the mooring buoy above...

Wow, I love diving!!!

Back at the hostel, Andrea & Elvira, my soon to be Kombi Buddies.