Training: Cobus and Russell's 1st open water dive 

Evan and Scott's Boat Dive for advanced course

Comments: Went down in a large group, poor vis, advanced divers taking longer than the ow divers, who were having their own buoyancy adjustment problems at the very outset. While waiting for Scott and Evan to descend, watching Cobus and or Russell balloon while they adjusted, one of the Arab guys from our boat approaches and signals that he wants to join us. Confused me at first because he had his buddy with him, but it became apparent his buddy wanted to surface, so he joined in. That made a group of 6 of us. Arab guy it turned out was on his very first dive, though I didn't know it at the time. At any rate, he stuck close to me the whole dive and was no trouble whatsoever

Grey moray, a couple of lion fish, clarinet fish, several kinds of trigger including the blue kind hiding in the rocks, red and white striped rock crabs, green morays draped in rocks puffing their gills as they worked open and shut their mouths, sgt. Majors, shoals of those fish that open their jaws all at once and shut them at once, puffers, stars (tiny ones, crown of thorns, big red and black spotted ones), urchins, flowery tailed fish, sea cucumber, grunts, fusiliers, wrasse, goat fish, groupers, parrots, clams, clown fish in anemones.

Because Evan and Scott were doing a boat dive, we all did a 5 meter 3 min safety stop hanging on the rope. At the end of the stop, one of our divers grasping the same place on the rope that had been at 5 meters did not move up the rope when it sagged to 6 or 7. No big deal, but just want to remember to mention it to him. It was his first dive and he was doing great. All concerned did quite well, not sticking close to buddies being the only improvement I could think of. Russell was clearly enjoying himself, and the o/w divers had excellent air control for first-time divers, so the dive lasted a full 45 min. for everyone.

Surface interval duration actual:

Training: Scott and Evan were doing the underwater naturalist dive with a 3 min safety stop

Cobus and Russell did their ow dive 2:

How we did this, we descended to 10 meters swam around a bit observing rays and such, got into the sand, tossed away regs and recovered them, tried to get the guys to half fill a face mask with water but both went full monty first time round and flooded the masks completely, cleared them effortlessly, so I left that at that. Next I had the guys do alternate air source breathing, stationary. Must remember to mention to them to leave the regs in the mouth up to the moment of exchange one for the other. Last thing was fin pivots, and then we headed round the rocks again.

We had already seen two rays. The first one was a small black one that right at the first of our dive rippled across our path almost unconcerned of our presence. He climbed up the rock to our right skirts aflutter, passed over it as if munching on it, and finally found himself a hole which he worked himself into so his tail was sticking out. The fact that he went in face first and stayed that way suggested again he was unconcerned about us. The second ray was a kind of skate I hadn't seen before, grey triangular, flat pancake ray, who skittered away as I was about to have the guys do exercises on top of him.

The rest of the dive was full of life. We saw a couple of flounder, lots of little pipe fish. We picked one up and passed it around. We found several morays. One was curled up in a rock next to a trio of black and purple lion fish, with a pipe fish just inside of that, very nice. Later on the dive we saw a turtle.

Also: schools of tiny red fish, guppies maybe, hovering around the eels, clown fish, trigger fishes, clarinet fish, I picked up a sand dollar, Cobus found a conch, saw it was alive, dropped it. Hamours, goat fish, guppies protecting the little blue crabs who live behind them in a hole.

When we were down to 100 bar we skimmed the tops of the rocks to get to the side the boat was on. Had no idea where the boat was, but worked that into the dive. We surfaced with Cobus and Russell doing alternate air source breathing about 25 or 30 meters from the boat, so Cobus tired diver towed Russell to the boat and Russell returned the compliment to take Cobus 30 meters to the island. At some point on our dive I had modeled a compass heading over sand looking for rays, east heading 30 kicks out, west 30 back. So here on the island we set a bearing north for a buoy just east of the boat, descended and compassed over to it. Cobus and Russell did the same. I had Russell come up on an emergency swimming asscent at the cable mooring the buoy. We then took a bearing on the boat, due west. We descended, and this time I hung back letting Russell and Cobus head west independently. They did just fine on that exercise, except that Russell amusingly swam right by the boat mooring -- but he was dead on it. Cobus came up on an ESA on that one, and we ended our dive pretty stoked on the day's events.