On the 18th (of May), we got up early at 5.30am and went for our first dive at 6, just as the sun was rising. Jillian, Gary and I went with Annika - a German instructor - do do our speciality deep dive. As a general rule, you always do your deepest dive of the day first, then do progressively shallower ones. If you have what's called a 'reverse profile' where you do a deeper dive than the last, then they can suspend you from your next dive to allow excess nitrogren to filter out of your body.
Ideally, you should descend to just above 30m because nitrogen narcosis - the same effect as being drunk but induced naturally by pressurised nitrogen in your body - starts to kick in there, but we could only find 22m. Annika did a few demonstrations like releasing an egg yolk into the water - where the pressure suspends it in a ball - before we ascended again. Her compass reading was altered by accident during our dive, so we came up to surface about 100m away from the ship and had to get towed back by the motor dingy, which was a bit of added excitement.
After breakfast, we went down again at 10:30 to do our navigation speciality dive. It wasn't particularly difficult - just using a compass to do circuits - but it gave me an idea of how to find my was around underwater. Usually you don't need a compass when diving, but should I need to I now know how. I said goodbye to Jillian and Gary after that dive as they were only doing a one night stay, then went for another dive at 4 with my new French buddy, Frank. We went down to about 12m as I did my photography speciality dive, which didn't need to be guided. In fact, it was my first dive where I was the most experienced diver, so I got to lead it in the sense of making sure we weren't lost and knew where the boat was. It's no formality, but usually the more experienced diver keeps an eye on the state of the dive as you're going along.
I had my second night dive that evening and chose to go guided just so that I'd see more. We only went down to 10 metres, but Benny - our Dutch guide - found us all sorts of wildlife, including a pufferfish, an amusing creature which looks like an overinflated balloon with fins.
