We’ve been offered a chance to run a small dive operation in the north of Bali. The dive centre is owned by the Company, and accompanied by a hotel resort. The customer volumes have been low throughout the year for the last two years or so, and the Company would like to see the business grow. That’s what they’re hoping to achieve by sending us up there.

There are positives and negatives to the offer, as always. Negatives first: It’s up there, far away from everything. It takes three hours in a car up the winding roads over the mountain range and through the jungle to get there, and the facilities are not that up-to-date. Only one of us would have the actual work visa with real pay to boot, the other one would have to get by with commissions and sales, which means quite a meager wage for one of us, and not a massive amount for the other one either. (I do have to say though that we’ve been living off one budget for quite a while now, so that wouldn’t be anything new.) The local religion (Balinese hinduism) has a habit of sounding off very lound prayer calls in the morning as well as in the evening, which has proven irritating in the past. And we’d have to do supplying trips down south (read: Sanur/Denpasar area) pretty much weekly to keep the shop and the resort stocked.

On the positive side, it would be an unparalleled chance to show what we can do. We would get to design the dive shop interior, run the daily operations, deal with customers and answer their emails. We’d also have to manage a little staff, learn the nooks and crannies of accounting a small business and do all the marketing both online and offline. There is an opportunity to be one’s own boss without actually bearing the financial burden of becoming an entrepeneur. We’d have the freedom of making the best of the business as we can, creating our own best practices and ways of working. Also we’d improve on the web pages, try to get them higher in the search results and also do some translating.

Moreover, it’s not every day that fresh diving instructors get the opportunity to run a business to the best of their abilities with this amount of history in the field. It will look very good in both our diving and non-diving CVs, not to mention the mass of experience we’d gain from the trip. Plus, we’d be diving easily the best sites in Bali pretty much daily. Just because of the remoteness, not too many divers actually make it all the way up there which makes the sites absolutely pristine and teeming with marine life.

Adding to that, we’d finally have a real apartment, with a real kitchen and bedrooms and air conditioning and stuff, all paid for by the company. That is to say, yours truly has been suffering from home sickness in the sense of longing for a home anywhere for a while now, and having a place to call home is extremely fetching for me indeed. Even if it wouldn’t be for much more than a year or so, it would still beat moving every four months. And, did I mention the steady pay for one of us already? That’s something freelancing instructors down in southern parts of the island don’t get. That would mean we wouldn’t have to dip into our savings any longer, even if we wouldn’t be generating much income either. And we’d still get the commissions and provisions on diving days and equipment sold, as well as courses taught.

Many of the actual details of the agreement are still open, but we’ll do our best in negotiating them. We haven’t been discussing the actual whens of the deal either, but we do know that we could do our trip back to Finland in September and continue the work in October.

But, as always, it’s not as cut-and-dry as one would hope. As Heikki wrote, there’s the option of Finnish summer, our loved ones and probably the best food in the world. With the unemployment benefits and summer cottages to take care of, we’d be happy as pigs in mud there. Need a good, hard think on this.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

[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.

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!

We also got a quick glimpse at technical diving (tec for short) by trying out double tanks and other tec gear, and boy was it difficult. I’ve done a fin pivot (see a demonstration in Youtube) approximately a million times in my own and rental scuba gear, but the buoyancy/weight balance of the tec set was so completely different I didn’t even get close. On the other hand, the additional mass made it somewhat easier to control my depth. That may sound a bit odd to someone who has never dived, but it goes like this:

[a long explanation follows]

Whenever I’m underwater, there are two forces that affect my depth, namely gravity and the buoyant force of water supporting me. When these two are in balance, I can float around in same depth for as long as I want. However, the buoyant force is a bit complicated to manage.

As we know from elementary physics, the buoyant force of water depends on the volume of the object, which in this case is a breathing human. When I breathe in, my external volume changes somewhat. I then displace more water, become more buoyant than with my lungs empty. It may not sound like a big deal, but breath control is actually the most effective way to do depth changes in two to three metre range.

Now, throw in around 10 kilograms of extra weight (compared to my standard equipment), and the situation changes somewhat. The weight has to be countered with extra buoyancy, which in turn makes my breathing relatively less significant to my total buoyancy.

[a long explanation concludes]

Anyway, the experience was fun, and I was still able to control my depth with breathing well enough. The experience was fun, but right now I’m not sure technical diving is my choice. I still find a lot of interesting stuff within the limits of recreational fun diving, so there’s no incentive for me to go there – at least not yet.

Tomorrow we’ll be having a compressor and equipment maintenance workshop. Should be fun!

The original plan for us was to do our IDC in April, which would have given us more than enough time to do the required hundred. We both had some 30+ when we arrived and we’re somewhere around 80 right now. Given that the IDC starts in two days and I’m still overexhausted from last week, I’m going to have a hard time reaching the three-figure mark before IE.

Luckily, BSB is a 5-star Career Development Centre, which allows its instructor candidates to fulfill the requirements out of order. This means I can take the IE with only 60 dives, sail through it and do the remaining dives afterwards.

What a relief. Now all I have to do is stop telling myself that I should somehow match the performance levels of my beloved wife. I guess it’s an equality and pride thing for me to bring in as much competence as she does. Yes, yes, I know it’s stupid, but still something I need to work on.

In other news, we finally have to change our bike. The current one seems to have a bad alternator and a bit of cold start trouble, giving me leg cramps from all the kick starts. Let’s hope we get a better one as a replacement.

And my youngest brother is here with his GF and they’re starting their OWD course tomorrow. Something tells me we’ll be assisting on that, which would also be nice.

And I almost forgot the best news of the day: we have a bottle of Ardbeg on us, kindly brought in by Andy. Bestest!

Melon butterflyfishes are plentiful all around

Starfishes can also be found every here and there

Small shrimps live in anemones, seeking shelter from predators

Triggerfishes eat coral and sometimes attack your fins

How do you say “oriental sweetlips” in plural?

More manta rays starting from this photo

Nudibranches come in all colours…

…like this…

…and this…

…and like this. Besides these, there’s about a million more.

All this and much more can be found from Indonesia alone. Just imagine how much stuff there is to see arond the world.

Tomorrow we’re doing more guiding practise in Tulamben, and Sunday is again a day off. We’ll be having a beach party on Saturday to celebrate Eeva’s birthday and our first anniversary. Feel free to join us

Monday and Tuesday: Diving in the sea, possibly doing speciality courses

Wednesday: Skill demonstration practise in the pool

Thursday: Theory exams, studying

Friday and Saturday: Diving with or without guests, practising guiding or other divemaster stuff in real-life situations

Sunday: A day off, but we can go diving if we want to

…and I’m guessing we’ll be following this guideline for quite a while now.

Since I had some neck and shoulder tension from yesterday, I decided to stay at the dive centre today (instead of several hours in the bus, probably making the tension worse).  I think I made a good decision, since I got to teach my first skin diver course as part of the student’s pool session. Since I am not certified to do that yet, we had to have an instructor looking after us all the time, but I was the one doing the actual explaining and demonstrations.

Which was nice.

Our article got published in the paper version, too. Here.

(Sorry, only in Finnish.)

Of course we ran out of batteries while taking the photos, but I guess we’ll have a chance to take some more in the near future. I have to exchange my fins to a different model since the ones I got don’t fit properly, but otherwise all seems to be well. More diving to come tomorrow, so we’ll see how they perform in actual open water.

Reports will follow.

The exams were about assisting student divers, guiding certified divers and conducting training programs independently as a divemaster. I scored 100 per cent in the first two, but misread a question in the third and got “only” 95% from that. Anyway, a pass is anything over 75%, so no problem there. These were the easy ones, we’ll get down to business when we start studying physics, physiology, decompression theory and so on.

Yesterday we also got our new equipment and it’s waiting for us in the office until it’s paid for. If everything goes well, we’ll get to try it all out today in the pool. Right now I’m waiting for the dive shop to produce a bill for me to pay. Otherwise we’re clear to go, and I’ll snap some photos if we get there today.

First of all, it’s actually quite hard work in relatively rudimentary conditions. We typically get up at 5:30, have breakfast from the fridge (no cooking equipment) and arrive at the dive centre at 6:30 the latest. Then we pack up, help the centre staff haul all the equipment to the van, wait for the guests to arrive and head out for a dive.

The Bedroom in all its glory – a bed, a cupboard, a fridge and a toilet

It takes from forty-five minutes to three hours to get to the dive site, depending on which one we’re going to. Some coastal sites can be reached by car, but most of the time we take a boat directly from Sanur.  Usually we do two or three dives and practise some skills during them, have lunch on board or in a beach restaurant and head back to the dive centre around two o’clock or so. After the return trip we wait for the equipment to arrive, service our own stuff and usually give a hand to the staff with air tanks and such. If we’re not exhausted enough after this, there’s always some studies to do in the afternoon.

Returning to Sanur after dives

Finally, if time allows, we take some time to relax, surf the net and spend time with the dive centre staff.  There’s nothing waiting for us in the Bedroom, so we’re in no hurry to get back there. Usually we grab some dinner around seven, take a quick shower and hit the hay at nine. Rinse and repeat.

This is what we have to put up with day in, day out: fish

And yes, it sounds worse than it actually is. We commute by bike, go diving on a boat, get a lot of sun and fresh air on the way and the general philosophy of the whole industry is to have fun. We’ll also stay pretty fit just by attending the training, there’s a million places to eat in, and we actually get to do something we like. Right now it’s the best job/training/whatever in the world, but I’m sure it will be worse some days.

Still, why didn’t we do this any sooner?