Week 7

Day 54–56: Open Water Simulation

This week started with our Open Water simulations. Since there weren’t any real students, we had to pretend. Some of us were “instructors” demonstrating skills, while the others played the role of students, making mistakes on purpose so the “instructors” could catch them. Honestly, it was fun but also super tricky. We also practiced for our upcoming skills test: you’re shown a sign for a random skill and have to demonstrate it perfectly while being graded (1–5). I totally messed up my 5-point ascend/descend (why are the abbreviations so confusing?!) and watching it back on video was… painful. Let’s just say I hope practice makes perfect.

Day 57–59: Pee Wars

These were my last dives with my favorite instructor, so we tried to make it as fun as possible. Somehow we started a “pee war”, basically chugging litres of water at the surface, then trying to pee as much on each other under water (gross, I know, but also hilarious). I hit a record of 5 times in one dive! Maybe it brought us luck though, because I spotted my second pygmy seahorse and even a devil ray! It felt kind of poetic, since on my very first boat dive with him we also saw a devil ray. We also went down to 40m for our deep dive, and let’s just say narcosis definitely kicked in. We were dancing underwater, everything felt extra funny, and it made the dive pretty unforgettable.

Day 60–61: Saying Goodbye

On Sunday my instructor had his last day. Saying goodbye was tough, and missing his farewell party made it even harder, but I had something planned already: a trip to Arborek to find mantas! The island was stunning, and it was nice to see a new part of Raja Ampat. On our first two dives we struck out, no mantas at all, even though the dives were still beautiful (so many tasselled wobbegongs). We had given up and just went for a house reef dive. And of course, that’s when it happened. A massive reef manta appeared out of nowhere. It was a bit far and only stuck around for 5–10 seconds, but it was still huge and so impressive. Mission complete.

Coming back to the IOP quarters after Arborek didn’t feel the same though. It was emptier, quieter. My instructor wasn’t the last person to leave either, and I could feel that the dynamics were about to shift again.