I took a group of guys out diving from the Mercy ship recently. The Mercy is a huge naval hospital ship that visits East Timor every year. They tour around South East Asia, but East Timor is the only country they visit on an annual basis. The ship is huge and is fully fitted out with operating theatres, opticians, dentists and specialists, unfortunately though, no recompression chamber. The work they do is amazing; one of the guys was telling me about kids horribly disfigured with cleft palates getting their smiles back with a relatively simple operation. Another kid was burned in a fire seven years before and his skin on his legs was fused so for seven years he could not walk. After an operation he was bicycling around the decks of the ship!
After the first dive, the lads produced their own lunch in the form of a ration pack complete with its own cooker! It’s a plastic bag containing magnesium, just add water and you have your very own boil in the bag cooker, really impressed me and Edu (One of my local staff). Can you imagine the concept of creating heat without a flame or electricity?
This weekend has been fabulous; we had a white tip reef shark at Dili Rock which was totally oblivious to our presence. It was being cleaned by a fish and getting annoyed with it so every couple of minutes it would circle around then settle back on the sand again, not aware of us, what a display.
My next dive was with an Advanced Open Water student doing her navigation dive. Half way through the timed task my watch stopped. Then trying to navigate a reciprocal heading she was going completely the wrong way, I then realised she had her compass upside down. Finally navigating a square I realised geometry was not her strong point (even though we had practiced on land) as the compass headings she had plotted were 60 degrees not 90, we both have never laughed so much underwater.
And Sunday; Sunday was the second best dive I’ve ever done in my life. We had a fab first dive at behau village, baby cuttlefish, nudibranches, crayfish and blue spotted stingray. But the second dive at Secret Garden was absolutely incredible.
We had already seen white tip reef shark, blue spotted sting ray, maori wrasse and bumphead parrotfish and were just coming up to our safety stop. I was freezing! It was the 2nd dive of the day and I was teaching photography and diving with an instructor tourist and his rescue girlfriend so the dive was very slow and 26 degrees in the water.
I heard a noise and the instructor was pointing above me, I looked up to see a huge dugong swimming over me about a metre above my head! He then swam round all 4 of us and checked us out, so close that you were tempted to put your hand out and touch it (of course we didn’t though)
Then he took off to a sandy patch and rubbed and rolled himself in the sand wiping out the vis completely so we lost sight of him. Not to worry, he was in a playful mood, he came around and checked us all out again, then off again to rub his tummy. This routine went on for 15 minutes until my buddy and I decided that we were numb, we had been in the water for 67mins by then. So we left the other buddy pair to enjoy a few more minutes of the playful frolicking.
Luckily 2 of the divers had cameras so got some fantastic shots really close, but my buddy was so cold she could actually show the other divers her photos as her hands were shaking so much! It was so worth it though.
Photos by Vincent -Thank youMy only dive to beat this was the same scenario but with a 5m baby whale shark in Egypt!
Our new Divemaster says she wants to come diving with me as I seem to be on a lucky streak at the moment. For the 3rd day running I’ve seen something great, yesterday it was an Eagle Ray at Christoe Rae. Let’s see what today’s diving holds.....
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