Open-water certified

We finished our last 2 dives and are now officially open-water certified, which means we can dive on our own (which we probably won't do for a while) down to 18 meters. It was frustrating at first to think about everything using the metric system, but we are catching on.



Our first dive of the day was at Twin Peaks. We went underwater with our instructor, Belinda, and 4 other student divers. There were also two other assistant instructors, so the ratio under water is about 1 instructor for 2 divers, which is nice. On this dive we practiced a few more of the skills we have been mastering (flooding our masks under water & then clearing them, buoyancy control so we don't sink to the bottom). We then did the "fun dive" part & swam around coral reefs, seeing a nice variety of fish, including a clown fish, just like Nemo. We are going to get a fish chart so we can do a better job identifying what we are seeing down there.



The second dive of the day was at White Rock. The first westerner diver in this area was Italian and named three of the dives, White Rock, Green Rock & Red Rock, all after the colors on the Italian Flag. On this dive we practiced entering the water using a technique called the "drunk Mexican," by essentially just falling backwards into the water. We also practiced a controlled emergency ascent where we took out our air supply. We then went back down for about 35 minutes, the highlight of this dive was swimming through a natural arch in the reef.



We got back to our resort about 1:00PM, then ate lunch and relaxed on the beach with some books and thought about the details for the next leg of our trip. We met the rest of our class that night for dinner to celebrate finishing the open-water course. Our class had 2 girls from Ireland, 2 guys from New Zealand, a couple from Holland, a guy from Israel & a guy from London. We had some really interesting conversations, the girls from Ireland were on a year-long trip around the world, the guy from Holland restores classic cars for a living & the guy from London is heading to Florida to end a 6 month trip. It was our first night we actually drank alcohol and stayed out past 9:30PM. We found out that the beach really livens up after 10:00PM with the islanders swinging flaming things around.