Got a little more sleep last night and came to breakfast with more energy. It's funny how quickly you get to know other guests and staff and how comfortable you can feel sitting down with someone new. A large group of 14 guests arrived last night and they were still doing their own thing. Serge was running around busy organizing everything and I felt bad hitting him up with a request to rent a computer. My Oceanic VT6 wireless air-integrated wrist-mounted computer that is pretty new and had just been repaired at the shop was malfunctioning after the first dive. Really annoying when you pay good money for something that should be top notch and it performs worse than rental gear. Especially when it's critical life-support systems. I got a computer and an SPG and started the second dive. Sarah stopped me early on to signal I had a leak. I looked at my SPG and the hose was leaking from half a dozen spots. The dive guide signaled that I should go up, so I did. The two boat guys really were pretty clueless and tried to fix it by wrapping it with masking tape which obviously didn't work. I came back up and just removed the hose and replaced it with my original transmitter as a plug. Got back to the group and still got about 40 min dive. Unspectacular, but ok reef dive.
I learned that some hoses are designed to rupture in multiple places when they fail in order to dissipate the pressure and allow you to finish the dive as opposed to a single catastrophic fail point in the hose. Serge later said that he had dove for like 2 weeks with a hose like that and it only lost about 10 bar (5%) during a dive. Good to know for later. Still, having a failed computer and SPG in less than 24 hrs is no fun.
Our second dive was also a reef dive. No major finds, but still nice to just float along and look for little things casually with good visibility and very pleasant topside weather. Another 70+ min dive.
No one was up for a night boat dive, or even a shore dive, so I went on my own. We're in sort of a bay, and max depth is probably around 20m so it's really hard to get lost. I went looking for the wreck again, and although I didn't find it, I did get to take my time figuring out camera controls and taking some shots of shrimps, crabs, and nudibranchs. I really enjoy the house reef – in a small area, it's got a little of every environment – muck, black sand, coral, and even eelgrass – sort of a mangrove. At these shallow depths, you can literally go as long as you want. My longest dive this week was over 100 min and I only came in when I started worrying that dinner was getting put away !
Day 4 – Trouble in paradise
Little bit of drama today. There is one big group from Europe – they are a sort of dive club of people that all work at the European Space Agency. Major egghead and rocket scientists, but as you might expect, some funky personalities and egos. Apparently, some in the group were unhappy with the constant muck and black sand diving and wanted more coral reefs. As a result, the groups were broken up into a group that was mainly muck diving, one that was mainly coral diving and one that was in between (or maybe mainly photographers). We asked to be counted in the muck dive group and was put onto a new boat with new divers, which was fine. We met a nice Dutch couple – Peter and Karim, Luis from Portgual (who now lived in Spain), and Wim, a slightly eccentric older gentleman. Was still diving with Marnez, who has a quirk – he rarely signals with audible sounds, unlike just about all dive guides I've ever come across. He just sits there and when you check over at him, he's waiting patiently with something to show you. I suppose that's one way of making sure that you don't wander off and keep tabs on him, but I wonder what I'm missing and it doesn't seem the most efficient use of his time.
After we came in from the second dive, there was a group arguing loudly with it seemed other group members and either Simon or Serge. I guess the boat came back to refill some of the large 15L tanks and some divers felt this was an inconvenience. I think that's pretty crazy because a 15L tank is a privilege, not a right, and at most other resorts, you'd just have to suck it up and finish your dives early if you were an air hog.
At night we had a special treat. Bent gave a presentation on marine life symbiosis and it was really educational and entertaining. Among other things, we learned that some jawfishes live their lives in the anuses of sea cucumbers, eating their gonads and gaining nourishment through their excrement. If any anenomefish (clownfish) appear to be ventilating a lot or opening and closing their mouths rapidly, they could be carrying a parasite (some sort of 10 footed decapod) that lives in their mouth, eats their tongue away and then digs its feet into the stump of the tongue and stays there. Sometimes even two can occupy the mouth, which really seems to bother the fish. The fish sometimes will even suck on anemone tentacles to try to remove the parasite. The image of this apparently grinning demon face peering out of a clownfish's mouth is the stuff of nightmares. No need to make up monsters when they exist in real life!
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