divebunnie

So a great opportunity arose this week… the chance to go on a mini liveaboard to learn the ropes and some of the sites that we don’t get to visit on our normal day boats. “Fantastic” I thought, the chance to broaden my scope as a guide as well as get in some good diving and experience. Of course the night before we left, I was filled in on all the horror stories… tales of waking up at 3 am to hear the mooring lines snapping and having to chuck kit on, jump in and re-tie in the dark, of the boat getting a bit leaky and possibly sinking (I have heard of that happening for real… though not on one of our boats!) Suggestions of spooky midnight night dives on the Thistlegorm wreck too, kind of fired my imagination a touch. That was just the tip of the iceberg.
As it turned out, to my shame, I woke up feeling a little off-colour on day one… warned George… and by the time he was briefing the first dive I was in our cabin hurling up breakfast! Thankfully it only lasted the day, but considering, I had been wanting to do the trip to gain experience and knowledge, it meant that I missed out on quite a chunk of diving.
The planning of the dives went slightly out of the window due to the fact that our boat was in fact a turtle, masquerading as a dive boat! The cabins, saloon and crew were fantastic… but the owner was on board, who ruled his staff with an iron rod and would not allow them to use full steam. I think the worst moment was when one of our day boats flew past us on the way to the Thistlegorm wreck! One of the real selling points of doing a liveaboard is that you usually moor up on this remote wreck, giving you the rare chance to dive it at night as well as meaning that you are already there in order to jump in at the crack of dawn, hopefully getting the site to yourselves. This couldn’t happen, as the owner would not allow us to moor the boat there over night, in case bad weather built up (which, I must admit it, often can).
Having said all that, I did get the chance to build up on my experience and knowledge anyway… and added to that, we had a great group of divers, so all in all had a good few days.
The only down-side was that I missed the IDC party. We had 4 of our new divemasters on the course this time, all of whom passed really well from what I hear, and due to the number of our staff who seem to have popped off to Thailand, most of our newbies got the chance to get in a good week of working for the college.