As anyone who knows me will tell you, I'm someone who likes a good challenge. If I'm scared of something, I'll do it just to prove I can, regardless. If I suck at something, I keep at it till I'm satisfied. Sometimes it turns out well and sometimes it doesn't (motorbike accident), but more often then not I'm glad I stuck to it (except for the one time I went into the morgue at Old Changi Hospital alone on a dare and did some superstitious things that supposedly open your eyes to ghosts, thank god nothing appeared).
Now diving is a high-risk sport, and while I've never been particularly uncomfortable with the water, I generally am with the idea of death, injury, and other inconveniences like that. Which seems a little contradictory to my character (again, ref: motorbike accident, let's insert a picture below), but I put that kind of risk-taking behaviour down to ignorance and an unhealthy level of optimism.
That said, one of the things I've come to enjoy doing is diving solo. It's not something that is recommended, but one way or another I've found myself in that situation more than a few times in the 8 months or so that I've been diving.
The very first time it happened, a hundred possible newspaper headlines flashed through my brain. I was on my Rescue Diver certification trip in Redang, and my instructor had waved me off to explore the reef by myself. When my reel came undone and I found myself tangled around some coral, and then discovered I didn't know the way back after I lost my orientation disentangling myself, I panicked. My air consumption rate went through the roof and when I eventually stumbled back upon the group, I was down to 30 bars of air when everyone was at 120. It was my seventeenth dive and I hadn't been properly weaned off my reliance on a divemaster yet.
A month after that I was on a leisure dive at Tioman with a friend. My buddy, an AOWD student and I got separated from the rest in the swirl of pre-monsoon season sediments. After all the procedures to locate the rest of the group failed, we felt confident enough to tour the reef by ourselves. For me, this was in part because the trauma of my Rescue trip had given me an idea of what to do - how to take bearings, look out of landmarks, use time as an indicator. We ended our adventure by surfacing right beside the dive boat, surely no mean feat for a bunch of lost newbie divers.
Back home and dry, I recounted this story to my friends, who taught me yet more methods of keeping track of directions when diving. I reported back triumphantly a few weeks later after a rather claustrophobic and dark solo dive into the murky depths of Hantu.
Fast forward three months to Sibu, Malaysia. A friend and I were on a weekday trip, which subsequently meant that there weren't many other divers around - in fact, other than the Sultan, whom we saw zooming about in a speedboat and had to expressly avoid due to the menacing coast guard boats that followed, the dive sites were pointedly empty of people.
Diving without a guide was an amazing experience and I would do it again in a jiffy, given the right dive buddy. I was lucky that I was with someone who is competent and whom I trust. But don't let this detract from the fact that the divemaster was a lazy bastard.
Mainly, I'm writing about this because I get plenty of chances to do solo dives now. When I assist instructors on OWD trips, I invariably have to jump in and tie a buoy-line that the students can follow safely onto the seabed. Once I'm done with the knots there's always a few minutes for a breather and a little fin-around - the sunlight filters into the water and it is silent but in the silence there's life and I can't help but think the tranquility of being alone is the most enchanting feeling ever.
The very first time it happened, a hundred possible newspaper headlines flashed through my brain. I was on my Rescue Diver certification trip in Redang, and my instructor had waved me off to explore the reef by myself. When my reel came undone and I found myself tangled around some coral, and then discovered I didn't know the way back after I lost my orientation disentangling myself, I panicked. My air consumption rate went through the roof and when I eventually stumbled back upon the group, I was down to 30 bars of air when everyone was at 120. It was my seventeenth dive and I hadn't been properly weaned off my reliance on a divemaster yet.
A month after that I was on a leisure dive at Tioman with a friend. My buddy, an AOWD student and I got separated from the rest in the swirl of pre-monsoon season sediments. After all the procedures to locate the rest of the group failed, we felt confident enough to tour the reef by ourselves. For me, this was in part because the trauma of my Rescue trip had given me an idea of what to do - how to take bearings, look out of landmarks, use time as an indicator. We ended our adventure by surfacing right beside the dive boat, surely no mean feat for a bunch of lost newbie divers.
Back home and dry, I recounted this story to my friends, who taught me yet more methods of keeping track of directions when diving. I reported back triumphantly a few weeks later after a rather claustrophobic and dark solo dive into the murky depths of Hantu.
Fast forward three months to Sibu, Malaysia. A friend and I were on a weekday trip, which subsequently meant that there weren't many other divers around - in fact, other than the Sultan, whom we saw zooming about in a speedboat and had to expressly avoid due to the menacing coast guard boats that followed, the dive sites were pointedly empty of people.
Our dive guide made some side remarks about economies of scale and promptly left us to our own devices. The first dive he stayed with us for 3 minutes, then jabbed upwards and waved goodbye. After that he stayed in the boat throughout.
On one particular open sea dive the way the buoy-line shot out taut in 3 seconds flat hinted suspiciously at the strength of the current. The divemaster gave us a sideway glance and said, "You two are quite capable, why don't you go down and check the conditions out for yourselves, if you don't like it then come back up."
It took us 10 minutes to haul ourselves hand over hand to the bow, and another 15 to the seabed. You know those scenes from sci-fi movies, where the space-traversing hero goes at warp speed and pinpricks of starlight become trails against the gloom? Yeah, that's what it looked like down there. It was almost beautiful in a ghostly sort of way.
Diving without a guide was an amazing experience and I would do it again in a jiffy, given the right dive buddy. I was lucky that I was with someone who is competent and whom I trust. But don't let this detract from the fact that the divemaster was a lazy bastard.
Mainly, I'm writing about this because I get plenty of chances to do solo dives now. When I assist instructors on OWD trips, I invariably have to jump in and tie a buoy-line that the students can follow safely onto the seabed. Once I'm done with the knots there's always a few minutes for a breather and a little fin-around - the sunlight filters into the water and it is silent but in the silence there's life and I can't help but think the tranquility of being alone is the most enchanting feeling ever.
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