Hi friends!
Well, I'm officially working at a dive instructor! I know I said I'd post after the first week... but time flies and all of a sudden I was on a boat again!
So I'm working on a liveaboard dive boat that goes out on three day two night trips. On these trips, we've usually got one or two open water courses, which is your first dive certification. We also have advanced courses (which I taught both weeks so far) and we also have certified divers and snorkelers as well! The boat holds 32 passengers, which is a nice change from the 100 or so my last boat held.
So both weeks I taught the Advanced diver course and both weeks I also only had one student! Pretty easy for the first couple weeks of teaching! It went really well the first week and even better the second week! The advanced course consists of five dives: navigation, night, deep dive (to 100ft/30m), peak performance buoyancy and either photography or naturalist... depending on the students interest. Its a fun course to teach because the course is designed to hone skills (like navigation and buoyancy) and also introduce divers to different areas of diving (like night and deep). The skills are pretty minimal, its mostly just about becoming a better more experienced diver! It's way fun!
In addition to those five dives, I also do guided dives for the certified divers as well... leading them around the reef and showing them all the pretty things. The first week my guided dive was a little rough, since I had never dived the site... I was really the one that needed guiding! But it was still good... now that I've been out for two weeks I have a much better handle on the sites... like where Nemo lives and where the turtles like the sleep.
The sites we go to are really really beautiful... completely different places to where my old boat used to go! One reef we go to has a resident Maori Wrasse... they get about 6 feet long at full size. But most of them are really curious friendly fish. Our wrasse is called Wally... and he's SUPER curious. He hangs out under the boat and investigates the divers that are doing their safety stops underneath the boat. If you cup your hand and hold it out to him, kind of doing the queen wave, if you will, Wally will come over, put his big mouth in your hand and drag you around under the boat. It's amazing. One of the divers took a picture with me and Wally, so hopefully she emails that along soon and you can see what I mean :)
We also saw whales last week! I was cleaning the back deck, getting ready to pack the boat down (it was the last dive of the trip) and all of a sudden about 4 or 5 humpbacks surface just on the other side of the reef, a couple hundred yards away. Makes cleaning a boat a lot more pleasant when you've got company like that!
Even though I'm only gone for three days, it certainly takes a lot out of you. Last week, when I got off the boat, I barely made it out for post-trip drinks and crashed pretty hard the next day, sleeping until about noon. This week, I was planning on doing much of the same. Came home from post-trip drinks, crashed and was woken up by a text at about 9am asking if I was going to the waterfalls... Now... the waterfalls here are pretty hard to resist. I went and rounded up the housemates to figure out the plan. We had a problem... 8 people and only a 4-seater car. Hmmm... luckily, one of my housemates came up with a brilliant plan. Rent scooters. Silly, yellow, scooters. It was awesome. We rode them about 70km to Josephine Falls (which took about 2 hours... an hour longer than anyone wants to be on one of those things, by the way) but it was awesome. Josephine is amazing... there's big cliffs over deep water perfect for jumping, an amazingly scenic waterfall and a natural rock slide that you can slide down on your bum. Awesome. We hung out there for a few hours before turning tail and trying REALLY hard to get our scooters back by 5pm. We didn't make it, so we had the beautiful yellow things for the night! Made going to my work meeting that night way more exciting. Haha!
Things are going great in Cairns, I'm really liking my new job. Its a lot of work... a lot of physical work... I'm going to have some pretty good muscles after a few more weeks, but its good! Lots of diving, a good crew and I get to teach! Pretty exciting!!! Sending lots of love to all my friends and family back in the states.... come out to Cairns, I'll teach you to dive ;)
Love and fishes!!!
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