My first open water course! And fun dives!

Hey friends!
I'm finally getting into the swing of my new job! The first few weeks it was new and exciting. The subsequent weeks were really stressful and frustrating. There is SO MUCH to learn on this boat. I do everything from teach diving to pump the sewage. Most of it is more complicated than any other boat I've worked on, and usually involves a lot more heavy lifting and muscles than I'm used to using. It's definitely a boat designed for guys and I struggled for a few weeks trying to fit in and not get my ass handed to me by everything.

But the last two trips I've done, I really felt better about everything. It's getting easier, everything is making a lot more sense and I'm even getting stronger. The last two trips I've really found my groove!

I got off of the boat yesterday, and that trip was the best one I've had yet. I had my first Open Water course! That's your beginning dive course, for those not up on the PADI lingo. I had four students in the pool and out on the boat. Luckily I wasn't thrown into the classroom teaching yet, I'm much more confident teaching in the water than out of it! One of my students was quite the handful. She was from California and around my parents's age (so 39, right Mom?). But holy cow, she could talk. We would be doing a briefing about how to use a compass and she'd be asking about whalesharks! I'd be explaining our skills for the next dive and she'd butt in, asking if I thought she was properly weighted! The whole course was an exercise in herding cats. But it was mostly one cat in particular... In the end the whole group did very well, all of them got certified and three out of the four went on to do the Adventure course (a night dive, a deep dive and a photography dive).

I usually don't get a chance to take photos, since most of the dives I'm teaching (read: herding cats). BUT I've discovered a clever loophole. One of the dives in the Advanced course and the Adventure course is a photography dive, so if my students want me to guide them, I bring along my camera as well! Its a teaching tool, I swear. :)

This is a cheeky little moon wrasse that wanted to be best friends. 

This guy is called Wally and he like chasing divers, long walks on the beach and putting his lips in your outstretched hand and dragging you around in the water. He's about 4ft/1.5m long! 

Cute little Hawksbill turtle! 

Nemo! 

On day three of the trip, crew wake up time is 5:30. It's rough, but when you're looking at this as you're setting up the back deck, it's not so bad...

Now, you might think that working as a dive instructor now, doing 8+ dives a week, I would be sick and tired of being underwater. NOT TRUE. Last week, during my days off the weather was amazing, so I booked a fun day on a dive boat! Me and Mike went out on Quicksilver, a boat out of Port Douglas, which is about an hour north of Cairns. Neither of us had been to the reefs that far north, so it was a good adventure. Since I booked on through my new job (awesome staff rates!) we were on standby, so we didn't know what we could get up to until we got there. As luck would have it, there were two spaces in the dive group so we got to go fo free! The funny part was that we had to do a guided dive with a divemaster! I'm an instructor, Mike's a divemaster (doing his instructor course this week) and we had to follow around a little group. It was nice in the end, though. We stuck to the back of the group and ignored the problems the other divers were having! It was my day off! I didn't have to deal with anyone's mask issues! And I didn't have to navigate, because we were following around a group! Too easy. 

Underwater selfies! 

A true Nemo! 

Open wide! Flowery cod showing off his chompers! 

That's about all that's new and exciting at the moment! Stay tuned though... hopefully I'll be making post-Australia travel plans in the next few weeks and let you know what's next in my globetrotting life! 

Love and fishes! 

Dive Instructoring and Silly Yellow Scooters

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!!!

Gainfully employed... again!! :)

A thousand apologies for being the worst blog-writer ever and completely neglecting the last month.

I've been back in Cairns, safe and sound for about a month now, frantically looking for work as a brand-new dive instructor. I had a couple of trials and interviews, but none of them worked out. Everyone kept saying that the tourism would pick up and boats would start hiring any day now, but that day never seemed to happen. I have a handful of other instructor friends looking for work as well, so I was starting to worry about finding work as an instructor and getting ready to polish up my hospitality resume and start looking for bar jobs...

Until...

I applied for a job at the biggest PADI school in Cairns. They just certified their 130,000 PADI diver, so they're a huuuuuge company. I figured that since I was a brand spankin' new instructor, it would be a shot in the dark, but as luck would have it, they wanted to interview me! At the interview, I found out that in order to be considered for a job, I would have to go on a five day trial with the company, following two days of training in the pool and classroom and three days of training on the boat. It was a very busy 5 days, but it was a lot of fun. I got to work with really fun people and learned so much about teaching diving in real life. I basically followed around the senior instructor and watched him teach a full Open Water Scuba class, which is your first scuba certification. The boats go out for three days at a time to some really incredible sites, so it was some full-on training. Dawn to dusk every day kind of thing, but I loved every minute of it.

Apparently they seemed to like me as well, because they offered me a job! I start next week!!! I can't wait to tell you all about it... I'm sure my first week will be a bit of a mess, because there's a ton of information to remember, but I think it will be an amazing experience. I'm really pumped about it. So look for another post in a week and a half or so, hopefully talking about how awesome my first teaching experience was! Wish me luck!

Love and fishes!!!!!!!

Adventures in.... Perth!

More travels!

So after my instructor course wrapped up, we spent the last week in Exmouth just playing around and having a damn good time. One of the last things we did, was go on a dive under the Navy Pier in Exmouth. It's been called one of the best dives in the world, and for good reason! There were THOUSANDS of jacks and snapper under the pier. It's been in the navy's hands for a long long time, so there's no fishing anywhere near it, and the fish certainly seem to know. There were some HUGE grouper and a handful of sharks as well. Now, I really wish I could show you pictures of all the awesome things that I saw, the huge schools of fish, the toadfish, and alllllllll the lionfish, BUT unfortunately my camera has met its untimely death. As soon as I jumped into the water at the pier, it filled with water. Now, the outside of the camera may be waterproof, but all the electronics most certainly are not. It was still an amazing dive. 

After that, I flew back down the west coast to Perth... allegedly the most remote capital city in the world. I stayed with Luke, one of my friends from my instructor course, and he gave me the tour-de-Perth! Its a really nice city, but it was cold the whole time I was there... damn the Southern hemisphere and its backwards seasons. July is supposed to be hot!! Haha. But Perth was great, even went on a very very cold dive under a jetty. Despite the very very cold water (57F or 14C brrrrrr) it was a really awesome dive. I saw seahorses for the first time, which was rather exciting! And an octopus!

Other fun in Perth, went to the aquarium (of course... haha). Went on a very creepy tour of the Freemantle Prison. Think Alcatraz, but without the island. But it was at night, with teeny tiny flashlights, making for an extraordinarily jumpy time... but still fun! Awesome week overall, many thanks to Luke and his family for putting me up for the week... AND teaching me cricket!!

After that, I headed back to Cairns, and to the warmth! I've been back for a couple days now and its been great! On the job hunt AGAIN, so wish me luck! 

I'm a dive instructor!

Guess who's a dive instructor!!!

After nine days of training and two days of examination... I'm a dive instructor!

It was a pretty big ordeal. During the course, we worked all day for nine days doing classroom presentations, skills demonstrations, pool presentations and open water presentations. We learned how to teach, what to teach, went over mass amounts of theory, skills and paperwork. We learned risk management, marketing and sales to boot.

It was a lot of work, a lot of studying, but it paid off because when it came time for exams, we all passed! The exams took two days. The first day was our pool session, where we demonstrated a number of underwater skills, like mask removals, regulator recovery.... things like that. We also had to teach a skill in the pool with the other instructor candidates acting as students. Then we had our 6 written theory exams that night in physics, physiology, dive planning, equipment, general skills/environment and standards. Woo. The next day we had a full day out on the boat to demonstrate teaching in an open water environment and we also had to demonstrate the rescue of an unconscious diver on the surface. We did also manage a fun dive! The last bit of work we had was a classroom presentation on dive theory and THEN... drumroll... four new dive instructors were born!

Me and my instructor-mates. Joe, Luke and Anna. 

Other than dive classes, there hasn't been much else going on in my life. Diving has taken over my life for the last two weeks, but the last few days have been much more chill. Just been hanging around Exmouth, sleeping by the pool and letting my body recover from 11 days of study and stress. 

Today I went on an adventure with Anna, the other girl in my course. We went into a national park nearby and went to check out some of the beaches, gorges and some of the terrain. It was a really great day, pictures to come soon (as soon as I get them off my camera) but its really really beautiful out here. Very very different from Cairns, much more desert-y terrain. Lots of red dirt.

I'm staying in Exmouth until Thursday. Hopefully in that time I'll be going on the whaleshark boat tomorrow and diving Tuesday and Wednesday if everything works out! Then I'll be in Perth, a city in southwest Australia until next Saturday, hanging out, exploring and visiting friends. Then its back to Cairns to try and find a job as a super duper dive instructor!

Love and fishes! 

Whalesharks and mantas and dugongs, OH MY!

Hello from the West Coast! 

I arrived in Exmouth last Thursday... not even a week ago, but SO much has gone on. I'm out here primarily to do my dive instructors course, making me eligible to teach diving (once I pass...). The other reason I'm out here is for the amazing marine wildlife. 

So I got into town on Thursday, but my course didn't start until Monday. In the meantime, aside from studying course work, I was also able to volunteer on some of the shop's boats including.... the WHALESHARK BOAT!!! 

We went out on Sunday and from the beginning it was perfect. The sun was shining and warm (which has not been the norm since I've been out here) and the wind was calm (also not the norm...). On the way out to the reef, before we even got in the water, before we were even at the reef, we saw a dugong, which is Australia's version of a manatee... they're not quite as fat as Florida's sea cows and more brown in color. I've been wanted to see one since I've been out here, so right off the bat, I was ecstatic. 

We first did a small snorkel, just to ensure everyone was comfortable in the water before we started snorkeling with the whalesharks. After ensuring everyone was confident, we set off to find our sharks! On the way to find the sharks, we saw three manta rays feeding in some shallow water, so we decided to get a little sidetracked and jumped in the water! It was incredible, when we got in the water, there was only one of the three hanging around, but it was amazing. I've been waiting to see a manta ray since I started diving and have had some pretty unlucky misses over the years, but finally, FINALLY got to swim with one. 

After our manta ray adventure, we all got back on the boat and went to hunt down one of those big spotty fish... 

Basically, there are spotter planes cruising around looking for big giant sharks. The planes call the boats, and the boats go to the sharks. One of the crew jumps in the water with the shark and after the boat works its way around in a good direction, everyone else jumps in and swims along side, a few meters away. The first shark we found was about 5 or 6 meters long (15-18ish feet) We were able to get in with it for quite a while, it was really cooperative and didn't dive away into the depths. A little later we found a few bigger sharks, closer to 8 meters (22 - 24ish feet). These weren't as cooperative and after a few minutes they dove into the deep blue sea. But still AMAZING to see. 

Now, if a dugong, one manta ray and a total of four different whalesharks wasn't enough, we found an area on the reef where there were about A DOZEN manta rays feeding. We jumped in the water with them and unlike the first manta in the morning that bolted pretty quickly, these ones were not even slightly bothered by our presence. Some of them got so close, one even bumped into me! I'm not sure who it startled more! The most I could see at one time was five. Whenever one swam away, you would turn around and find two more swimming in from the other direction. It was the most incredible moment, something like you would see on Discovery Channel, but in real life. 

Since then, its been a little less fun and excitement... I've started my dive instructor course. It's going to be A LOT of work, 8 or 9 days of classroom and pool training followed up by a very scary two-day exam. It's a ton of theory, mock student training, rescue scenarios and classroom presentations. Like I said, its going to be A LOT of work, but hopefully it will be equally as rewarding. It's been going well so far, but this is only the beginning (cue ominous music...). 

Hopefully I'll have some more amazing stories to add to the not quite as exciting dive training this week! 

Love and fishes!!!

Goodbye Cairns (for now)!

Well, after 7 awesome months in Cairns, its time to see some more sights. I'm off today for Western Australia, a town called Exmouth. There, I'll be doing my dive instructor course. That means I'll be allowed to teach and certify people in scuba diving! Also in Exmouth there's some amazing reefs and best of all, there are WHALESHARKS. Big, beautiful, plankton eating sharks that can get almost 60 feet long and I'm going to swim with them!

I'll be in Exmouth for about three weeks, then I'm going to spend some time in Perth, which is a city about a days drive south. After that I'm looking at coming back to good old Cairns and trying to get a job with my new dive instructors certification!

The last few days in Cairns have been pretty crazy. I had my last day of work two days ago, which was a blast. There's a tradition that happens on boats around here... on your last day of work you get thrown in the marina! The Cairns marina is pretty gross. All those boats in such a small space, I'm sure there's plenty of chemicals... also some crocodiles, dead fish and other horrible things. And I got thrown into it! Twice! It's a tradition forged out of love... or so they say... But its been a great last few days here, making it even harder to leave! The good news is I'm coming back!

So its goodbye to Cairns for now... This has been such an amazing experience so far, I've met so many amazing people that I love to death. I've found such a great little family out here! It's sad to leave, but for now its only temporary. I'm off to new adventures! So expect more blog entries soon, because a lot will be going on that I can tell you about! And hopefully lots of amazing pictures!