The whole Europe seems to be in a halt because of the volcano and its ashes, but there’s always a silver lining for some of us: one of my old friends was in a seminar or such in Kuala Lumpur, and his flight got cancelled yesterday. Being the resourceful chap he is, it took him a full two hours to haul himself to the airport and buy a return ticket to Bali. I immediately took off to make him a hotel reservation, and it seems like we’ll be teaching an open water course starting in a day or two. Everybody wins!

Well, except the airline companies. Like, ten million a day? Dude.

Tags: diving, flying, friends and family, holiday, practical stuff, surprises, teaching, work

The photos are up! Here’s a selection of what we’ve seen in the past couple of days:

There was some tame wildlife available for photos somewhere between north and south Bali

The anemones in Purijati were full of small things

We also found a type of nudibranch (armina sp. 2) I hadn’t seen before

Yes, there were sharks in Menjangan island, and no, they’re not dangerous

I’ve been trying to get a decent shot of a stingray for quite a while

I’ve seen this barracuda threee times now, but it’s so big it’s hard to get good photos of it

It seems that there’s not much to do at the dive school today, so for once I have enough time in my hands to post something. I hope to find a few minutes every now and then to update the blog, but don’t hold your breath. The busy season is just around the corner.

Tags: diving, holiday, photos

We’re back from our holiday and well rested. We’ll be posting photos when they’re processed.

Now we’re out to do some groceries and have dinner. Tomorrow – you guessed it – diving. We’ll be teaching a course called Underwater Naturalist to three divemaster interns. Should be fun.

Tags: diving, holiday, teaching

It’s been a while since we’ve been fun diving, but today was exhilarating. I’ll once again let the photos speak for themselves:

You’ve seen these ones already: a lionfish at Padang Bai

The definite highlight of the day: a juvenile clown frogfish

Hermit crabs occupy abandoned shells for protection

Cuttlefishes are way cool

If these don’t qualify me to teach Digital Underwater Photography course, I don’t know what will. And it’s so much fun as well!

And that’s not all: we’ll start teaching our first course in two days. This will be interesting!

Tags: diving, instructor internship, it's good to be me, photos

It’s been fun, I have to admit. Also, it’s been hard and occasionally not fun, as I managed to drop a weight pocket today (writing this offline on Wednesday) to a slope on Sakenan dive site, depth of about 30 metres and struggled afterwards a bit… So yeah, becoming an instructor does not make you infallible in diving. We did get some pretty good dives in with moray eels and a frogfish, got the new wetsuit down to about 40 metres and crushed. I still need lots of kilos to get me under with it, but slowly it’s getting easier and easier.

[a very diving-specific explanation follows, skip if not interested:] For the uninitiated, a new wetsuit is very buoyant indeed, and going diving with a brand new one means you need to take a lot more weight than with an older, dived-in wetsuit. This essentially means that I was wearing both a weight belt and my weight pockets (integrated into the BCD), one of which gave and dropped off. In the blue. Which sucked big time. The buoyancy is a result of having gas bubbles within the neoprene (incidentally, this is the feature that keeps you warm, not the water that gets in your suit), and as gas bubbles have the tendency to be lighter than the surrounding water, buoyancy increases as the thickness of the wetsuit increases and vice versa. That’s also one of the reasons behind our doing a lot of deep dives lately – both me and Heikki have been compressing our respective suits.

Also, a cool feature of my suit is that as it’s deep red in primary colour, it turns dark purple when I go deeper than about 15 metres. This is because water absorbs certain wavelengths of light, and one of the first colours to go is red. So in effect, my suit changes colour! How neat is that?
[end of diving-specific explanation, you can breathe now]

In other news, we’ve been doing instructor specialties for the last two days and have a day or two more to go with that. We will end up with ten specialties each, which in turn means that we have a wider range of courses we can teach. We have now the Wreck, Deep, Drift, Night, Nitrox, Oxygen provider and certain fish identification, coral conservation and the like specialties. We’ll see what the eventual list looks like, but not a bad start at all.

While we were doing the wreck specialties, we bumped into a napoleon wrasse. It is a big fish indeed.

In the photo is our fellow German instructor, Mel (left). On the right, the aforementioned napoleon wrasse with a jack. Gives you some sense of scale, Mel’s a little taller than yours truly.

Also on the same dive we found an octopus barely hiding:

It was nervously flickering colours, which looked very wicked.

All in all, the Liberty wreck is a fabulous dive site, and the dives yesterday were just the thing that was needed to remind me why we do this. On a good day, the diving is spectacular, people are nice and things just roll. On a bad day, it’s just the opposite. We live in the hope that the majority of the days will be good ones.

Here’s a portrait of our colleague Mandy (U.K.) on a good day:

Look at those moves!

And I’ll leave it that. Will upload more later when we have a better internet day.

Tags: diving, instructor internship, it's good to be me, natural beauty, oh bugger, PADI IDC, photos, practical stuff, stress