Divers have log books to log their dives. One of the points of this is that you can then prove how many dives you’ve done. It’s not a very secure system – your log book is supposed to be stamped by the dive operator, but all the ones I’ve met just hand you the rubber stamp and you do the stamping yourself. But I guess very few people would want to fake their dive log.

Standard log information usually includes dive location, length (in minutes), maximum depth, start/end time and conditions (current, visibility, sea/wind etc). I usually include a brief note about any other salient points (boat dive vs shore dive) but spend most of the space on what I saw during the dive. Even so, going back two years later I notice that I cannot really recall the dive. But this close after the trip, each dive is still fresh in my memory so the log notes are enough to bring back most of it.

We made 14 dives in total – mostly around 50-60 minutes long, with a max depth of ca 17–20m. The first two were at the house reef, and the very first one was mostly spent getting everybody’s buoyancy right. Buoyancy depends on all sorts of things – water temperature, how salty the water is, the size and material of the air tank you’re using, the type of wetsuit etc. Buoyancy is adjusted so that you can float if you inflate the BCD (= the vest) but sink slowly when the BCD is deflated. You do this by wearing lead weights – either threaded onto a belt, or in the pockets of the BCD. I vaguely recalled having about 6 to 8 kg on our last trip, and started out with 6 this time, but that turned out to be far too little – I just couldn’t get down under the surface. I ended up with 12 kg!

The dives were of all sorts: one day we went out for the whole day in a “big” boat, and did two dives from the boad. Another day we did the same in a speedboat. That was a very windy day so the small boat bounced around a lot – this was the first time I’ve really felt seasick, and I was very happy to get out of the boat and into the water. Even just a metre below surface everything was calm.
Some days we just walked in from the beach, and other times a small Zodiac dropped us a few hundred metres from the shore and we then slowly made our way back. Distances that seemed very small on the surface took surprisingly long time to cover underwater.

A feather star (image borrowed via Google Images)

This trip had several “firsts” for us. We did our first night dives, at the house reef (or dusk/night, to be more precise). Just before 5 when the light started to dim, we had a Zodiac drop us a short way off the beach, and then swum back as it got darker and darker. And it got very dark indeed. When I was the last person in the group, I turned around and looked back, and despite a strong torch, all I could see was blackness. And the lights of the others’ torches became faint very soon – perhaps 10 metres or so would have been sufficient to barely see them. That was quite spooky, actually, so I made sure to keep close to the group. Wouldn’t want to get lost!

Otherwise, night diving was interesting but not spectacular. The colours looked different because the light source was close and didn’t have to filter through 15 metres of water. Many red corals and fishes looked a lot more interesting in torchlight. We did see a feather star. It was fully open when we noticed it, and curled up when we shone our torches on it. Other than that we didn’t really see much that we hadn’t already seen in the daytime. Maybe because it had only just gotten dark; perhaps the real night life comes out later.

We also did our first unguided dives. Previously all our dives had been planned and led by a guide, but this time some of the shore dives were so simple (follow the reef for half an hour, then turn back) that we ventured out on our own. It added some complexity: we now had to take care to keep an eye on the details (the time, how much air we had left, how deep we were) as there was nobody there to remind us. But at the same time it was actually easier in a way, because we only needed to keep track of each other and not worry about keeping up with the group or keeping an eye on the guide. Good practice in any case.