Today was Dive Day. I signed up for a ‘fun dive’ with Dive Central Gili (one of the 5* PADI dive companies on the island). It was a great introduction to the world of scuba diving. The morning session was mainly spent learning all the scuba theory, with a 30 minute introduction to the equipment, some basic theory and hand signals. Once all the class room stuff was covered off, we headed to the pool to try out some basic scuba skills, like clearing your mask, finding out buoyancy etc (although I am not that great at the latter, very jerky movements resulted in me either floating on the surface of the pool, or lying on my belly at the bottom.)
In the afternoon we headed out on the boat to Meno wall (a dive site just off Gili Meno). The wall runs from 5m down to 16m and a second wall runs a little deeper. Spanish dancers, crabs ranging from small coral crabs up to the huge sponge crab, lobsters, shrimps, sleeping turtles, baby cuttlefish and scorpion fish are amongst the many creatures that can be seen.
In total I saw
- Two massive turtles swimming (and a few hiding in the wall)
- A black and white sea snake
- A Mantis colorful shrimp
- An eel
- Two cuttlefish (having sex haha)
I spend most my time trying to get buoyancy vs. looking for fish I think. I was up and down like a yo-yo. At one point I was lying belly flat on the corral!
I also managed to flood my own mask 2x instead of clearing it. I got super congested also, so snot got all in the nasal area (I later found out it was all over my face – attractive!).
No photos of my own from today (Booo!!) so I stole some from the internet for you to have a look at.
ozzyadventureblog 