Wall of fish

I got up at a more reasonable hour and walked around to OK 2 Cottages up the road. The view from their restaurant while I had breakfast was fantastic. I just sat there for maybe two hours reading, then strolled back to Sunshine to get changed for my afternoon dives. This time we were on the “Bans Boat” – a boat owned by a large dive resort – so we got a taxi into town to hop onto it.

Today, Dave and I were accompanied by Jo; a bubbly Scouser on her Divemaster training course. Over the two dives, we saw a fair bit of stuff and helped Jo with her air use. Fortunately we didn’t see any trigger fish as apparently the last time she encountered some, she went through 60 bar of air panicking! After some discussion and figuring things out, I think Dave and I calculated that we both spend about twice as long breathing out as breathing in. I take roughly one second longer to breathe in than he does. The real trick is to stay calm and relaxed and enjoy yourself.

Maori wrass?

The first site we dived was South West Pinnacle and afterwards Aow Leuk which I’d done the previous afternoon.

Back at Sunshine I got talking to some of the staff and invited up to a barbeque which I couldn’t turn down. And didn’t. I grabbed some munchies, a couple of beers and the remains of my festival Jägerbombs to take with me and got a lift up.

It was a great night with many of the dive staff who knew each other from last year meeting up again. Our host, Victor, has a cottage up a hill with a disused open-air bar at the end of the street which is free for people to use. Good food, great company and plenty of booze.

Cute and unidentified

I staggered back with a couple of the lads at around 1am, then had one more beer at the Easy Bar before heading back to my bedroom. I managed to get pretty well packed as I needed to check out in the morning and then tried to sleep. Of course, as I knew I had to get up in the morning for early dives, I kept waking up! Not ideal with a 7am rise and a belly full of beer.