Certified Sérgio Simões PADI Advanced Open Water at Freestyle Divers, Dibba, UAE

Sunday May 25, 2014 

Vance conducting the last 3 dives in a PADI Advanced Open Water course

for Sérgio Simões,with Bobbi Stevens riding shotgun

My logged dives #1289-1291

Sunday was declared as an Islamic holiday in UAE and this gave us an opportunity to complete the Advanced O/W course I'd started with Sérgio Simões on July 13, 2013. Since he needed three dives to complete the course, we decided to do them in one day. Sérgio lives in Al Ain so we met at my house at 6 a.m. and all rode up together. We were at Lulu's in Dibba by 8:30 so we had time to stop off for breakfast prior  to rolling up at Freestyle Divers at 9 in the morning.

Our first dive of the day was the deep one, on the Inchcape 2, a wreck that Bobbi and I have dived dozens of times, but is always appealing, and the ideal challenge for an advanced deep or wreck dive. It's a set piece 20 minute 30 meter dive. It has a mooring buoy so is easy to find and descend on. Back in the day there were two resident honeycombed morays living there we used to call Fred and Frederika, so accustomed to divers that we used to stroke them. They disappeared after Gonu struck and were replaced by two small offspring who unfortunately succumbed to the months long red tide, and since then honeycomb sightings have not been common. Sometimes there are rays there, but none today, probably chased off by the crowds of divers on the small wreck. Still, it's a great experience for someone doing his 7th dive ever, and first time to 30 meters. 

Next on our list was the underwater navigation dive, and next on Freestyle's schedule was Dibba Rock. This shallow site can be ideal for navigation unless there is current tugging at the shallows, as there happened to be on this day. We were dropped in at the aquarium and started our navigation at the marker buoy tied off on one of the rocks there. I led from the aquarium 30 meters to the southwest with the reef on our left, except it wasn't a good 30 meters because we were swimming against the westerly current and when Sérgio turned around to lead us back he went past the marker because it was by then only 15 meters away.  We then tried a compass heading to the west and return to the east but again the return leg was much shorter than the way out (that is, 20+ kicks out and only 10 kicks return). Realizing we'd have to factor in a significant current Sérgio and I worked out on the slate that we should try the square 10 kicks to the north and 21 to the west, and so on. This worked except that on the third leg the current pushed us back onto the buoy line, so we ended up doing a triangle, not a square. It wasn't Sérgio's fault, his navigation was good and up to the challenge, so I congratulated him and we went off on a fun dive.

We went looking for sharks, like this one Dro Madery found recently and posted to Facebook. As can be seen in the photos, the sharks like the very shallow water close in to the rock, so we let the current nudge us to the east as we looked into the likely places. We turned up a few barracuda but nothing much else by the time we were in what appeared to me to be the shadow of the rock to our west. On this assumption I went looking for the gap leading to the back side of the rock but kept coming into shallow wall. We were in the shadow of the current as well so now we could push to the west but when we got more resistance in only two meters of water I decided to surface and see where we were. Surprise, we were to the west of the rock, not the east, as I had thought. so we had made a big circle around the front side.

The thing to do now was to head north, which was seriously difficult into the current, but eventually we found the aquarium and with deeper water got some relief from the current. We continued to the back side where we found a few morays at 12 meters depth. The current was pushing us along now so we went with it drift diving until Sérgio got low on air, so we went higher on the reef and burned off our three minute safety stop, with coronet fish serving as entertainment.

For our last dive we had requested the artificial reef that Andy had laid down some years before and which had been attracting animals ever since. For Sérgio it seemed an appropriate place for his underwater naturalist dive and his final dive for certification as a PADI advanced open water diver. Sami Al Haj gave us a briefing that described perfectly how we would follow the artifacts from a set of balls and geodesic structures to a line leading to a submerged boat and a pile of triangles with lots of places for fish to hide. At that place we found a delta ray, the kind that remains immobile even if you wave your hand over them to blow off the sand. There was no current here so I found a corner of the reef where we could do a square pattern. On the second leg Sérgio suddenly stopped and I thought he had become confused but we later found it was because he had seen a huge ray swim by just beyond our field of view. I was focused on the square because we were in sand now, no idea how to get back to where we had started apart from a perfectly executed square. It was a great feeling of accomplishment when we ended the exercise in exactly the place we had intended!

Congratulations to Sérgio Simões on completion of his PADI Advanced Open Water Dive course, Certification Date May 25, 2014