PADI Advanced Open Water Diver and The Mysterious Humpback Whale

Week 3 – PADI Advanced Open Water Diver and The Mysterious Humpback Whale

With 27 logged dives in Tenerife already, and successfully completing my adventure dives, I am now a PADI Advanced Open Water Diver! Next week I’ll be studying and diving for my PADI Rescue Diver course.

As I wrote about before, we were of to El Puertito to see the Turtles, and we did see them!

They were so beautiful to see, and very curious. They came very close and we were allowed to touch them gently.

Last week I did my Adventure Dives, which included my first Peak Performance Buoyancy dive. On this dive, we took two hoops with us in the water, one above the other. Sophie, a girl who was doing her PADI Advanced Open Water Diver course at the same time as me, came with us for the two dives.

Our assignment was to swim through both hoops in a big circle, without touching them and without adjusting our buoyancy with our BCD’s, only using the air volume of our lungs. We both had a really great time and no problems with going through the hoops.

Directly after the first dive, we were off to our second Adventure dive that day, which was the Navigation dive. For this dive, we swam three patterns under water, using our compass for the bearings and counting our kick cycles (fin kicks) for the distance. After swimming our straight line back and forth, a square and a triangle I felt satisfied and exhausted. It had been a very nice day with two great dives.

Mid week, during one of the dives, I had the highlight of my time here. We did a dive to a small wreck, called Poco Naufragio, where the stingrays live. We saw two of them, they were huge and very impressive.

Unfortunately they soon discovered that we were not very interesting, and they disappeared back into the blue depths. We swam around a bit more and saw a couple of Trumpet fish, Arrow Crabs and Fire worms before we headed back to the boat to change tanks.
While we were slowly ascending, feeling relaxed and looking at the environments, I suddenly spotted a young humpback whale swim, swimming directly behind the other divers, around 20 meters away. It was so close that I could even see the barnacles on the whales head, and recognized the species as soon as I spotted the whale.

I immediately signaled to the other divers, but by the time they were all looking in the right direction, the beautiful whale was just a big shadow in the distance and no one else got a good look at it. I felt delighted about seeing this beautiful creature in the wild, and couldn’t wait to share my enthusiasm with the others.

When we all got back to the boat, I discovered that none of the other divers had really seen the whale, although they admitted to have seen something a lot bigger than just a Dolphin. As I had realized as well, this Whale had of course been far too close to shore, something that they normally wouldn’t do. It had also been alone, another rare condition to see a Whale.
Replacing my enthusiasm with disappointment a little bit, I found out that none of the other divers believed my story. Of course, their arguments are strong and true; these were very unlikely conditions to spot a whale. Nevertheless, I still cannot deny that I am sure of what I have seen, because I got such a clear look at it.
Despite most of the others now thinking that I am mad or had a hallucination or even had Nitrogen Narcosis, I am still enjoying this extremely special and beautiful moment never to forget .. (L)

Going back to the rest of my story, I have now also completed my first specialty; PADI Boat Diver, as part of my PADI Master Scuba Diver course.

Tomorrow we’ll go back to the Turtles and later this week to the Stingrays, who will hopefully show themselves a little longer. Next week Harry and I will be doing our Map dives, with the assignment to make an underwater map from a part of a dive site. Hopefully we will not embarrass ourselves and get lost!

Sadly despite having a great time in Tenerife my grandfather, after a long fight in hospital, has sadly died.

Rest in peace my dear grandpa, I miss you and think of you! (K) (L)

Many kisses, love and strength to everyone at home! I miss you and love you! Xxx

Love, Alice