And the currents keep rolling!!
Saturday, September 20th, 2008Oh the current that is Pulau Weh! Since our last posts we have been basically alternating between dives with current and dives without. Once we went to a site called something drift, obviously to do a drift dive and there was no current! Go figure! Well Mark, Deb and Maryanne are getting better diving in the current, however we have learned that I am shit in the current! Twice I have had to end a dive, once because just getting to the bottom I was breathing hard and could never catch my breathe once down there which really freaked me out, so that dive lasted all of 12min to include a 3 min safety stop. Luckily the rest of them came up and said the current made the dive not so fun anyway. Then today the current proved too much for me as well. This morning we were supposed to do a check dive to 45 meters for our dive on the wreck. So we hop overboard and swim like crazy down by the time we got to 30 meters the current was too strong to make it to the wall and drop to 45 meters. While everyone was close to the guide I was taken far down current no where near the wall, oopss. I really struggled just to get to the bottom of this ledge to grab a hold of some rock to hold onto since there was no way I could kick upstream to get to the group. I could see Maryanne looking around trying to find me but I was 25 meters away (not good in a current)! Finally they started swimming towards me, once Maryanne was close I had caught my breathe but wasn’t excited about the dive so yeah I ended that dive. Maryanne and I drifted off into the blue to do our safety stop, well that proved tricky! We got stuck a few times trying to swim up during times of down current! Then during our safety stop we were bouncing between 3 and 7 meters. Once to the surface we were so far from the boat we had to use our whistles like crazy to get the boat to see us since we drifted so far away! I did learn two things though, one I suck in the current and two if you wear a wetsuit you need to add more weight! Here is not like Koh Tao it is a little too chilly for me so I thought I would just wear a wetsuit. Well I didn’t compensate enough for the extra bouyancy, duh! So I was working harder to get down then everyone else! At least now I know, that I don’t completely suck at diving in a current! We are getting a workout for sure, definetely no 5 dives a day here! [read on]
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