I’ve been out of the dive roster for a few days now due to a cold. I’m getting better now, but I guess it will take a day or two before I can jump in the water again. Better to go through it properly in the first place instead of delaying recovery by rushing in too early.

If a couple of the coming days are a bit uncertain, so is the big picture. We have less than two weeks left in the homestay we currently live in, and no one seems to know if it’s feasible for us to stay here or not. It depends on the job description and amount of customers, but that’s not all. We’ve been looking around for alternatives, and surprisingly there’s a host of things in favour of returning to Finland for summer. More about those some other time.

Now don’t get me wrong, working and living in Bali is excellent. The most pressing reason to leave is a financial one, since at least the first three months here would be without base pay or other benefits. Paying the rent, transport, food and other mandatory things  on commission only would require us to work around the clock without a day off, to cut down on accommodation and food, or most probably both. The alternative is to supplement income from our savings, but that’s neither sustainable nor good for other future plans. Money is not going to multiply by itself, so we need to find a way to support ourselves. On the side it would be nice to accumulate the savings a bit instead of devouring all of them.

We’ll keep you guys posted on where we are. There should be something to tell in a few days.

Tags: diving, flu, money, planning, work

Yeah, I’m still here too. I’ve had some ear troubles, so it’s been dry days for a while. Finally the ears started to feel better, and I got a call asking if I’d be willing to do two nights in Tulamben (diving during the day of course). I said sure, so here I am, waiting for the guest to turn up. Chances are there’s going to be at least the wreck and the Drop-off, needless to say I’ll want to know what the guest wants to do.

Otherwise it’s been quite quiet and relaxing, I’m still on the internship (i.e. not getting paid but getting to dive a lot) whereas Heikki signed off from the internship (guiding & teaching for money, but when there are no guests, he’s not diving either).  As Heikki already wrote, we’re looking for a place to move into, as our rent for the Bedroom is only paid  until May 17 or 18. The little room has served us well, but I’m most definitely looking forward to not having to use earplugs six nights a week thanks to the less-than-brilliant band playing across the street. Some of the places we’ve seen have been absolutely beautiful, some less so, but all the same they’ve been pretty much in the top end of our price range. Looks like we need to do some more searching, which requires a lot more footwork than back home.

Most of the rentals are not in newspapers or online, but simply advertise their availability on the street they’re located. The closer you get to the beach, the steeper the prices (obviously). Luckily we have the scooter, which gives us a pretty nice range too. Keeping our fingers crossed.

Tags: accommodation, diving, oh bugger, practical stuff, prices, Tulamben

I haven’t been writing for a couple of days because I’ve been more or less busy with almost nothing. Visa renewals, work discussions, long days with customers and so on have kept me away from blogging. However, I managed to snap a couple of photos during the time:

Hingeback crabs in Tulamben

Oriental sweetlips on the USS Liberty wreck

A nudibranch in Tulamben shallows

I’m having a day off today, so I’ll just sort through my e-mail, do groceries, and maybe go check out some places for accommodation. We have found a couple of nice ones already, but I feel like we need to check out some more before doing the decision. Eve is doing first aid training to one of our new divemaster interns, so she should also be available to check out places in the afternoon. Stay tuned.

Tags: accommodation, diving, photos, teaching, time

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

The song by Dio keeps playing in my head on repeat, as we’re closing to our instructor examinations. The next two days are about our mock examinations, then we have a day off and then it’s the real thing. The point of no return, so to speak – we’re about to become certified as instructors. Time flies.

I keep on thinking back to home, and the more I dive here, the more I want to dive back in Finland too. Yeah, sure it’s cold water and the visibility is anything you can put your hand through, but nonetheless. I want to take those tanks to our summer cottage, grab a row boat and go dive our fishing sites. I want to go find Oulu 2, the tugboat that sunk over 60 years ago. I want to teach everyone I know to dive (okay, exaggerating but anyhoo). I want to, because now I know for a fact that I can.

One of the things that kept me from diving back home was the fact that I wasn’t comfortable with my skill level in doing so. Sure, there were friends and probably people from the dive club or centre who would’ve helped, but now I know I have what it takes and that I can handle it for sure. Conditions are different, but these months have given me skills to adapt.

So, tomorrow it’s the mock exam open and confined (read: pool) water parts, where we get to demonstrate our abilities in teaching, problem solving and evaluating whether or not the students can master the skills they need to. Lots of fun, and some not so fun. I have one of the trickier ones to conduct, but preparing carefully should do the trick.

Chances are that next time I write, I’ll have a new certification to my name. Wish us luck!

Tags: diving, exams, instructor internship, PADI IDC, practical stuff, time