Today was the first day of our advanced diving course and what a cool day it was. We both absolutely loved it. We did three dives today, all at Lighthouse bay. We are the only two people doing the course so we have the instructor, AJ, to ourselves. The first dive was at Helgas and was our deep dive. We went down to 30 metres - it was really different to other dives I've done where I've only been to 20 metres max. It was much darker and there were much more fish. Neither of us suffered from Nitrogen Narcosis - it was almost disappointing. Just before we ascended we saw a massive Queensland Groper -- absolutely huge.
Our second dive was at Blizzard Ridge again, and was the navigation dive. Matt has no sense of direction above ground so I wasn't sure how he'd manage it under water. First it was his turn to navigate. The idea is that you start at one point and you have to go a certain distance in one direction and then go around in an exact square to get back to the place you started. So Matt headed off in one direction. When it was time for the first turn he went in the opposite direction from what I expected and I couldn't persuade him to go the other way, so I just followed him. He didn't quite make it back to the start point, but it was a decent effort for him. Then it was my turn. Navigation is certainly more difficult than it looks but I did manage to make it back to the start point -- I just didn't see it any kept swimming right by it -- Whoops! I was a little bit disappointed with this dive as for some reason I used up loads of air and we had to finish the dive early.
Finally the last dive of the day was fish id. Not much to this, we just swam around and looked at fish. Easy.
It was late afternoon by the time we got back to the dive centre and sorted out our gear. We wandered around the shopping centre and then relaxed for a while, before heading out for some chinese food. Some of the people who were saying in the hostel in Coral bay with us are now at the Potshot so we had a few drinks with them. A couple of them went out on the whale shark trip with Ningaloo Reef Dreaming and saw two sharks and got to swim for an hour with them. And they got a video and photos of the day. Ah well, you live and learn.
