Keep Diving

It wouldn’t be a holiday if we didn’t manage to get some scuba diving in and so this morning we were picked up and taken to Belle Mar to the nearest dive school at the Lux hotel.

Before we could venture into the open water, we had to have a quick review in the hotel pool just to show that we could do the basics as it had been nearly two years since our last dive. With this accomplished we boarded the small speedboat to take us out to open waters. This was where it started to go a bit, well, wrong, for want of a better word!

All along the coast, there are reefs which means that the water closer to the shore is more still as the reefs break up the waves further out. So when our boat passed the reef we were suddenly confronted with huge waves. Some of them were more than 10ft high and threw the boat around quite a bit. I would have thought that we would have entered the water further out where it appeared to be a bit calmer, but no, the dive site we were visiting was right in the middle of these waves.

We were told to enter the water with a reverse entry and when I did, a huge wave pushed me back into the boat while still underwater and I smacked my head on the hull of the boat. A bolt of pain went through my skull and had I been on land I would have had to stop for a bit to let the pain subside but that’s hard to do when your in the water being thrown around like a rag doll.

I managed to get away from the boat into a bit of open space as a headache immediately took over. There was no going back however and so there was nothing to do except get on with the dive.

The dive itself was OK. There wasn’t much to see except for the usual array of fish and moray eels but it was good to just get underwater and enjoy the dive. Everything seemed to be going well until I realised that I was using my air quicker than everyone else and in order to make it to the end of the dive I had to buddy breathe with the dive master.

When we were back on the boat, a combination of headache and huge waves weren’t doing me any favours and I felt quite sick. Getting back on land I was able to see how badly I had cut my head and the resulting lump on the top of my head. My headache had not subsided but as we had a second dive to do there was nothing to do but suck it up.

The second dive was also out in the huge waves, and while there wasn’t much difference in what we saw, my larger tank now meant I wasn’t going to run out of air. However, this time it was The Wife whose air depleted quickly and had to share with the dive master.

One of our group, an Estonian, didn’t appear to adhere to the PADI rules of diving as he kept going off on his own and at one point ended up going off with another group of divers, much to the annoyance of his dive buddy, the dive master!

Afterwards we were taken back to our hotel (after a quick diversion into Trou D’eau Douce to pay for the dives) and I was able to clean up my cut head and spent the rest of the day relaxing on the beach.