Green turtles made my week!!

Two good dives at Yellow Mountain with lovely boy Lewis. Lewis is certified Open Water Diver who felt comfortable and chilled underwater. The weather wasn’t as good as it should be in Tenerife we were actually freezing underwater but still it is worth to do such a good dives. My buddy was CK. We were together with Tin Man, Susanne and Alice.

The best day of that week  Despite the beginning where CK mixed Tin Man kit and packed wrong wetsuit for him.  Although that Graham decided to dive with CK’s t-shirt and his swimming shorts. He looked ridiculous but he didn’t want to miss his dives. He was freezing underwater but I admire him for swimming without his wetsuit.

Dived at El Puertito with green turtles for the first time. I was so excited and really enjoyed those 2 dives. You cannot hear turtles while they are swimming but when you finally see them it is a nice surprise  Turtles are beautiful, very calm and chill underwater. They aren’t afraid of people at all. What is more they swim to you for a short distance and allow you to touch them. I really enjoyed El Puertito as a place to dive you may see various fishes and invertebrates. I had a chance to see for the first time sea hare. I saw also few crab the flat one and arrow crab, common octopus, atlantic feather star as well.

Waterskills day!
Even I am the slowest one I really enjoyed those days. Firstly in the morning I did my 400metres and I improve my time. The new one is 11:29  The rest of the skills we did in marina. I towed a diver for 100metres at the surface for the first time and I had really nice time 2:42. I have 4 points for that. I was really proud.  800metres snorkelling is not my strong point.

After waterskills day each days are the laziest one ;). Today I was just reading my Divemaster manual all day long and did my emergency action plan. Good day also !

In the morning Alice informed me that I will be assisting her with DSD on the boat. I already knew that Jenny doesn’t fill comfortable underwater (her swimming pool session wasn’t the best one) so I was aware that I will be holding her tank for the whole dive. 15l cylinder, 8 kilos on me, how cool is that?! …anyway Jenny wasn’t able to dive so I just went with Matchew and Alice for fun dive. It was nice. I saw a lot of various octopus and fishes. I had a good time that day 

In the afternoon I was helping Tin Man with his Emergency First Respond course. My role was to be a victim - I was pretending drunk person with broken leg :D Tin Man was actually very surprised he did not expect me to be so good actor ;)

Two swimming pool sessions with Susanne, Melissa and Marloes ( Susanee’s friend) – she just started her OWD. We had a good time. Marloes is really good with her skills. She field comfortable in the pool. The funniest thing was the Marloes’s position – she was like a dog underwater. Just keeping her hands in front of her for the whole time. We called it Lady Gaga stile or puppy one :D
In the afternoon we did once again stamina test. Once again I improved but these time with my favourite one ;) 800meters snorkelling.
I will be awesome at the end of the internship with my skills :D

Finally im a PADI Rescue Diver.....and playing with dummies!

This week started off with Will showing up and our PADI Rescue diver course starting.

Basically we went through all the things we learned in our Emergency response manuals and had a good laugh at all the ridiculous stuff we had to practice on the dummy.
The EFR course took us through all the "skills" needed to help someone in trouble.

Tuesday we spent a ton of time in the marina going through the rescue diver confined session.
We spent at least 2 hours in the water going through all the tows and rescue scenarios and all the skills and before that we had done another 800m snorkel which both Hannah and I did poorly on.
After that it was regular day in day out kind of stuff, we had basically mastered all of that at that point so it was all good.

On to our mapping dives which we need to complete to pass our Divemaster course, which we done at Yellow Mountain. Our maps were just simply awesome!!
We also finished our Rescue diver course with two open water rescue dives. It was awesome even though Hannah could not get Alice out of the water to save her life…and by that I mean she eventually managed after quite a bit of work.

Las Eras was our next dives, I was buddies with Kali and Hannah was with Kali’s husband Yaro. Las Eras is one of my favorite dive sites but it was the first of a couple of days of really terrible visibility and surge underwater that we experienced.
But on the whole even though we had some issues, it was a good learning experience for me and Hannah.

Then the next day we went to Abades and due to the weather (just wind and surf) we decided to skip going on the right side of the bay and decided to only go on the left side.
Luckily I still was able to go and even though visibility was poor I enjoyed the dive.

The next day we went on dives at Yellow Mountain and originally Hannah and I thought we were leading dives to Alien Rock and Swim Through but with the poor visibility Alice took over and lead the dives.
Then on the second dive as I was swimming along near Yaro he pointed out a pair of underwear floating along the bottom nearby, that was quite funny!!

The next couple of days we had a few pool sessions and DSD’s in from the hotel pool so that was good.

Eric ~ Bananaman