What's going on with the dolphins?

This happened in 2007 in Oman

This one from Brazil, can't see when it was posted



If that's hard to view you can open this link in a new tab or window:
http://elcomercio.pe/player/1384898

Thanks Nikki for passing these on

Diving Musandam and Dibba April 20-21 2012

My logged dives #1114 - 1116

Bobbi and I didn't dive at all in March.  This was partly due to bad weather and partly to the fact that I was doing a lot of traveling to conferences that month.  I was in Morocco to give a plenary talk in February. In March I traveled to Erzincan Turkey one weekend, was at TESOL Arabia in Dubai another, and went to Philadelphia to give a presentation at the annual international TESOL conference there.

Our last attempt to dive in UAE resulted in cancellation last February, and I had to finish off Tim Chambers's dive course in frigid blustery conditions shore diving off Yas Island. In April we tried to dive in Oman but bad weather blew in and turned Al Sawadi beach into a froth of whitecaps, no boating that day. Ironically dispatches from further north that weekend gave excellent reports to Dibba Rock, with sharks and turtles and lots of animals sighted in fine conditions.

One week later, Bobbi and I turned up there with Michelle and Dusty, on a second day of diving where we drove up to Nomad on Friday, dived Musandam, spent the night, and then went over to Freestyle divers to do a morning dive and then head home on a drive taking all afternoon.  The weather had been unstable but Wind Guru promised us a break for the weekend. We were the only customers at the dive center that day. We found on arrival, not beforehand unfortunately, that the crowd was off on a dhow trip that weekend in memorial for our good friend Terry, whom we miss and dearly remember in a context where Dibba Rock used to be one of the best places to dive in the world.

Dibba Rock can still deliver, as it apparently had the weekend before, but on this day it was murky, and there was a current ripping across it east to west.  James and Chloe were there, and James did the boating.  We were the only customers and it could have been a great day.  But the buoy for the aquarium on the west shoulder was missing so we didn't have the usual reference when we descended there, and we were dropped closer to the rock than we were accustomed to, into coral heads that looked similar to but were shallower than the coral we normally start with on Dibba Rock.  This is critical because I follow those coral heads to the south and then cut west to put me on the reef proper.  On this day I followed the coral but it angled to the east which confused me.  Knowing my direction to be west, I led us that way but didn't come out on the reef I was looking for in the time I thought it should take.  I surfaced a couple of times trying to get a reference from the rock but that was useless and I finally called James over and asked him to spot the reef for us from his vantage on the boat.  He gave me a heading to the north which I followed until I got back into the aquarium area and then I basically followed the fish to the west, the swirls of snappers and traveli, quite beautiful, until we dropped right down on the spot where the mooring had been, where I had meant to begin the dive in the first place.

We were by then 44 minutes into our dive, but the good news is we all still had at least 100 bar, so from here I could try to find the reef.  Unfortunately this didn't work out so well either.  I went to the end of the coral on the aquarium, turned west, but didn't really come out on anything I could make out to be reef.  There were a number of reasons for this.  One was current effect, so I was probably just slightly to the north of where I had intended to be.  This would not have been a problem in decent vis as I would be able to see the reef to the south, but this day was so cloudy underwater that we had no such reference. As the reef disappears it's getting harder to find in any event. I turned south and tried to follow coral, but currents were tricky, and the by the time we surfaced after an hour of diving we had seen little of interest apart from beds of sea urchins.  James said that from our bubbles he had seen we had followed the edge of the reef, but it had been a disappointing day at Dibba Rock.Dusty said he doubted he'd ever go back there, and this is why even Freestyle schedules a lot of its dives elsewhere these days.

The day before we had dived Ras Morovi and Lima Rock with Nomad Divers.  Bobbi and I had our 5 mm suits, Dusty was wearing my 3 mm overalls with top that provides 6 mm at the core, but Michelle was wearing a 3 mm wetsuit with 2 mm legs and sleeves and she got chilled if we went too deep.  As usual at Ras Morovi I tried to find the deep spot with the barracuda but I've never been taken there and have never been able to find it from anyone's description.  We ended up coming up the channel where I know some caves where sometimes there are rays.

Coming around the corner there I saw a large flat mottled ray in the sand.  I paused and awaited the others and the ray, becoming aware of our presence, eventually rippled sand, moved off, and headed for one of the alcoves.  Flapping his wings slowly, he moved there deliberately, then positioned himself in the sand as we moved forward.  Suddenly another ray appeared from the left approaching like a glider to join the first ray in the sand.  We hovered nearby and watched them, and after a few minutes I decided to check out what might be in the cave at the end of this picturesque gully.  So I went over to the cave and entered it, shining my light into the back.

Then a really interesting thing happened. One of the rays came into the cave behind me and passed beneath me, startling me a bit, but as my buoyancy is good, there was room for the two of us.  He went on into the the back of the cave and I was thinking how strange that was when the other one followed and again passed right beneath me, in such a way that had he been aggressive he could have barbed me easily.  Now the two of them were ahead of me in the cave, having passed not a meter below me, in a confined space about three meters wide, and I was blocking the exit. One of them seemed to realize that as he maneuvered to where he was facing me, or maybe it was my torch shining in his eyes, but he started rippling his wings the way an elephant does its ears when he's becoming agitated.  So I backed out of the cave and regrouped with my dive buddies, and the rays came along behind and displayed some more formation flying, which we admired before leaving them in peace.

On all our dives that day we saw lots of pretty fish and a variety of morays, including the BIG gaping honeycomb ones. The only other things I recall from that dive are that right after Michelle and Dusty surfaced, Bobbi and I took advantage of the fact that Chris hadn't set a time limit on the dives and extended our dive to well over an hour, and in this part of it we found a large crayfish exposed to my torch beam when viewed from the side in his lair, and right at the end we were entertained by a school of squids in flights of fancy.

Virtual diving this weekend: Oman

I'm taking a break from diving to enjoy a brief visit from my granddaughter this weekend, except that I've been diving into Facebook and came on this ...

In case you can't read it, my comment says: "I lived and dived in Oman ten years 1985-1995 and I live in UAE now partly so as to live just over the Oman border. I've encountered all the animals shown in this video numerous times."

Here's the video that shows the animals we've encountered in Oman and in the UAE in the many years we've dived in both places:

To embed the video, Blogger asks you to input its title and it will search YouTube for it.  The search on the title of this video "Oman Diving, Scuba Diving - Ministry of Oman Tourism" got half a dozen hits.  One was on a film uploaded by the Oman Tourism authority on Dec 27, 2011 with this commentary:

"Many thanks to Khaled Sultani for sharing this video with us. The video is, to a certain extent, the 'best of' Dimaniyat Islands. It's an accumulation of around 4 awesome weekends of diving in this location in Oman, over the past few years. Sadly the visibility isn't always great but it's tough to beat when it comes to richness in Marine life."

Sadly, it's true what they say about the visibility. We had the honor and pleasure of diving with Khaled and his team of video photographers in the Damaniyites last September, on a weekend when the visibility was on 'sadly' status.  Still we got in some great diving.  My blog posting for that weekend features a YouTube embed that Khalid took on one of our dives.  Check it out:
http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2011/09/bobbi-and-vance-fun-diving-at.html

Started PADI o/w course with Tim Chambers in Musandam with Nomad, Feb 17, 2012

My logged dives #1110 - 1113
Tim certified Feb 21, 2012

Through the grapevine I got put on to the fact that Tim Chambers was looking for someone to teach him diving, I agreed so he was put in touch with me, and we decided that the Nomad 1800 dirham deal for certification in one weekend all dives, accommodation, and meals included, would suit him.  He had done the elearning and he lived not far out of my way home from work, and he had a pool at his compound, so it made sense for me to pile some gear in my car and swing by his place one day after work to meet him and relax after a long day in the office in at least one pool module to start off his course.  That module went so well that as long as we were there with air in the tanks, I suggested we do the second one, which also went smoothly.

That put us two modules up on the course when we arrived at Nomad Thursday night.  Traffic was bad out of Abu Dhabi and we were delayed in creeping jams, so when we arrived we found our dinner waiting for us, the other half dozen guests having eaten already, Nomad uncharacteristically quiet, and even Ivor having gone to bed, having exhausted all his jokes for a change.

Tim and I agreed to meet at 7:30 next morning back at the hot water fountain for a cup of Nescafe before kitting up for the pool.  We had only module 3 to do, which we got through quickly since the pool thermometer showed 16 degrees, no urge to linger there.  But it wasn't actually that bad in 5 mm wetsuits and when Suzanne, one of the other instructors who would be diving on our boat with us, showed up with students at around 9:00 or so, we decided to push ahead with module 4 rather than sit around waiting on them.  It was very relaxing having got two modules out of the way before arrival at Nomad that weekend, not the usual rush to complete the minimum 3 modules before our first two ocean dives Friday morning.

We were all aboard the boat by 11 in good order, about a dozen of us, Aliona in charge, with intent to dive Ras Morovi and Ras Sanoot.  However, seas were rough and dark skies loomed offshore; Ivor said later he'd seen a water spout out there.  We were getting spray aboard increasingly as we neared Lima Rock, and it was clear that all the south and east facing rock faces, including Ras Sanoot (Wonder Wall) were taking crashing waves. At least it was warmer than the previous month.  I didn't put on anything over my t-shirt on the trip out until it started getting soaked, and I was warm enough even then in damp flannel and fleece.  We were glad to arrive finally in the sheltered bay of Ras Morovi, having been batted about for the past hour and rinsed with sea spray.

Aliona had no students and she invited Bobbi to accompany her to see the barracuda.  I think I know where they are now, to the right or west of the tongue starting south underwater, not on the east side as I'd presumed last time with Nicki and Luke.  But Tim and I down for his first dive ever were not going so deep as to see them.  We took our time entering the water and meandered out into the sand looking for rays, found none, and headed back to the picturesque reef at Ras Morovi, teeming with snappers and blue tang surgeon fish.  I pointed out bream and ten minutes into the dive we came upon a school of batfish at a cleaning station where one of them was getting a makeover by an accommodating wrasse.  We found a few eels, including a small honeycomb moray, and in the sponge coral past the saddle heading north, we came on a turtle who seemed not to mind that we came to watch him munch on whatever it was he was eating.  We also found a huge crayfish under a rock ledge relying on armor for protection, as he was fully exposed in my torch beam and had he been a sea cucumber I could have reached in and grabbed him.  But then had he been a cucumber, I wouldn't have bothered.

Tim did well on his first dive and was properly amazed by it all, but we lasted only 31 minutes plus a 3 minute safety stop before having to return to the surface.  This would improve with better buoyancy which for Tim had been quite good for a first time diver, and he certainly enjoyed it.

The weather was turning for the worse and we encountered light rain as we motored across the bay to the shelter of the Ras Lima headland.  There we found a massive red tide.  We had lunch and then motored around looking for an end to it, but eventually decided to return to Ras Morovi, the only sheltered sea cove in the region with known decent visibility.

We did our second dive there.  This was a skills dive for Tim.  We started on a surface compass heading and did snorkel / regulator exchanges over to shallow water, then descended on a patch of raspberry coral.  I stopped short of the coral and took Tim through the module 2 skill set in the sand there. At the deep side of the coral patch we found a rope attached to a metal object and decided to use that for our controlled emergency swimming ascent practice.  Returning to the depths we used the rope as a landmark to do a compass heading to the south and return to the north, Tim spot on.  All that out of the way we went for a dive in a westerly direction, a direction I've not dived before, and we found rock walls there, looking nice with trigger fish and some lion fish in the sand. We followed our noses down to 16 meters before returning the way we had come, as we'd been asked to meet back in the cove where we'd started.  We found a honeycomb moray and near the raspberry patch a huge coelenterate the size of a basketball with pulsing tentacles and a floater chewed into by turtles.  That was interesting to watch for a while.  This dive went for 47 minutes, and we arrived at the surface just in time to see the boat round the point to the east so we had to wait ten or 15 min for it to return.  Tim did his tired diver tows while we waited.

That night back at Nomad Ivor informed us that dives next day were cancelled so Tim and I decided to get our last pool module out of the way before dinner and see if we could get in any shore diving next day at Freestyle where they have a breakwater that might have offered some protection.  But in the morning we found seas raging with white water waves all up and down the coast.  No boats were going anywhere that day.  We went over to Freestyle but found it deserted and no chance of a shore dive in the cauldron the sea had become.  We drove back over into Oman and headed up Wadi Bih and tried to gate crash the road to Zighy Beach, but this exclusive hotel had a no riffraff rule and somehow we didn't pass muster and without a booking they wouldn't let us in the gate.  I'm not sure I'd want a booking at that resort though it's reputed to be nice (no riffraff there I hear :-)

Anyway we gave up, mission unaccomplished, all we could do was head back to Abu Dhabi and hope to regroup later to complete Tim's last two dives of his course.

----------------------------------------

Four days later, we finished the job.  We used a stretch of beach opposite the highway from Ikea on Yas Island, Abu Dhabi, and got wet in about 8 meters of water with a clay bottom that stuck to my dive boots.  It was cold and windy with white horses on the water, but actually warmer in the water (at least with 5 mm wetsuit) despite its being about 21 degrees.  We did two dives of about 15-20 minutes each.  On one of them I saw a feather-like tail in the sand and saw the body of a small stingray bolt just as we got in sight of it, leaving a cloud of silt to conceal its exit.  Apart from that we found not much apart from a few rocks, not many fish.  Tim ran through his remaining skills and we got him certified.

Finished PADI Advanced o/w course with Luke Ingles in Musandam with Nomad, Jan 27, 2012 - and Dibba Rock from Freestyle Jan 28

My logged dives #1107-1109

After our diving was aborted by bad weather (or expectation of bad weather) the previous week, Luke and I returned to Nomad with Nicki in tow, Bobbi stayed sick in bed. We did a multilevel dive our first dive.  We planned a 30 meter dive for 15 min, to come up to 20 meters for 10, and then finish out the dive above 16, but in actual fact we did this on our first dive at Ras Morovi:

We entered the water at 12:33

• We dove only to 75 ft (22 m) for 30  minutes to accumulate nitrogen up to PG Q
• We then came up to 50 ft (16m) for 15  minutes to  accumulate nitrogen up to PG V
• And we finished above 40 ft 12 meters for 11 minutes to emerge (after a safety stop at 5 m) in PG X

The dive wasn't phenomenal.  We were last in the water, Ivor shepherding some open water students and photographers so we had no one to guide us to the deep spot at 30 meters where the barracuda hang out.  Luke, Nicki and I plunged as far as we could but reached only 22 meters where I didn't see the tell-tale sea grasses I was supposed to be watching for. So we worked our way back up the channel where Nicki started finding stuff. First she found some neat miniature crabs in some anemonae.  Then she discovered a flounder (sole) in the sand and not long after that a scorpion fish.  We both saw the turtle at the same time.  It was Luke's first time to see a turtle, though I've seen that particular one before, a small one with barnacles on its back.  He's young and likes to move fast in the water.

The second dive was across the bay at Lulu Island. This was one where we start inside Lulu Island and round the point and then head east.  It's a cool navigation exercise since after 10 min we arrive at these looming submerged rocks, swirling with trevali and other interesting fish. We didn't see much on this one, a moray on the way over, another scorpion fish.  We came up the back side and crossing the saddle to the inside of the crescent which these islands form we hit stiff current, very stiff.  I was already coughing since it's winter here, the water is 23 degrees (5 mm wetsuit helps :-) and I'm getting over a cold.  But with the current, exertion, coughing, I was low on air at 40 min.  Luke too, the two of us came up together, though I popped back down to see what Nicki was up to at 5 m, not much from what I could see.

For the record, on this dive

• we descended at 14:45 after 1 hour 12 min surface interval as G divers
• Dived at 16 meters for 42 minutes (47 min NDL)

We were  very glad we didn't dip below 16 meters at any point during the dive because then we would have had only 34 min NDL and such a dive might have posed serious health risks.

It was a cold boat ride back to Nomad but Luke and I were prepared for it with lots of layers of wrap.  It was relaxing.  Back at Nomad's homey hostel, Luke and I went for a run up the road to the Golden Tulip and then returned on the beach, a lovely sunset run dodging waves lapping.  On arrival back at the hostel, someone handed me a welcome beverage and I never showered from the run, just sat until dinner time enjoying the company, enjoying the company after dinner, doing a round on guitar, nodding off at the table, finally going to bed just after midnight, and sleeping till 8:40 a.m.

We had booked in at Freestyle for a boat ride out to Dibba Rock at 9:00 but at our breakfast table at Nomad I checked an email from them that said they were doing an expedition south in their only boat, but we were welcome to come and shore dive, so that's what Luke and I did.  We got there at around 10:30 after espresso and croissants at Nomad, found a gorgeous day with calm clear seas, walked Luke through his last remaining advanced navigation dive on dry land, kitted up and hit the water for the long swim out on a 30 degree heading.  We were doing fine until we neared the island and picked up a noticeable current that started sweeping us west.  I told Luke we should descend and continue underwater, our only hope of not being swept off the site entirely.

We descended and found ourselves trying to tack north by facing east and keeping ourselves crabbing toward the reef to the north. It was hard work trying to insinuate ourselves onto the reef that way and not get hammered off it, as the current was trying to do.  However as I worked my way onto the reef I was rewarded by the sight of half a dozen devil rays swooping overhead.  I looked back toward Luke but there were only bubbles.  Up ahead a turtle veered off the reef, again Luke a bit too far behind.  I clawed my way onto the reef hand over hand grabbing whatever boulders I could find.  Another turtle darted overhead.  I found a sandy patch and waited for Luke. When he arrived I pulled out a slate and wrote on it, "6 devil rays, 2 turtles."

But this was not easy diving, and how were we going to do any navigation work in this current?  I thought the only way was to get into the lee of the island.  That would be to the north. I wrote on the slate and handed it to Luke "must go north."

I moved in that direction heading my body almost east, tracking to the north, just kicking myself into the current and letting the current move me north.  A shark came into view.  I turned to look for Luke, again trailing behind.  I stopped and added to the slate, "1 shark".  When Luke caught up I showed it to him.

Amazingly the shark came back.  I saw it at the edge of vision where the shark moved, difficult to see if you weren't accustomed to their movements.  Luke peered that way.  The shark kept in view, circling us.  Eventually he turned our way and I went his.  He was in plain view now, Luke saw it, his first ever in the wild.

When the shark passed we continued north and soon arrived at the Aquarium in the lee of the current, and here we were able to conduct our navigation exercises.  Luke did fine, but all the exertion had taken us below 100 bar. We still had to get back to shore, many hundred meters the way we had come.  I wrote on the slate "home = 210 degrees".

We headed back that way but I deviated to follow the reef. The entire dive we were shallower than 10 meters. Overhead a devil ray passed and Luke saw that one.  There were lots of other fish, like giant puffers, but no more really salient creatures.  We reached the end of the reef and headed out over the sand.  When Luke ran low on air we surfaced.  Up top we were caught in the sideways current and had to fin at an angle toward our destination, partly against the current.  But the closer we got to shore the more the current relented.  Our only problem here was the bloom of jelly fish, small ones, most of whom were benign.  Occasionally one would get caught in a mask strap or get trapped in our lips or neck and caused minor annoyance.  But we made it back ok, interesting diving, truly advanced.

Started PADI Advanced o/w course with Luke Ingles in Musandam with Nomad, Jan 20, 2012

My logged dives #1105-1106


It was just Luke and I, Luke driving, as we set out on Maroor Road in Abu Dhabi just before 7 a.m. and arrived at Nomad Ocean Adventure just after 10 a.m.  We got Luke a 5 mm wetsuit and before heading for the harbor we plotted a multilevel profile on the giant presentation wheel at NOA which Luke would execute on his first advanced deep dive.

The profile was

• 27 meters for 20 minutes
• 18 meters for 10 minutes
• 18 meters for 40 minutes is allowed, but we decided to limit ourselves to 20 min at 12 meters
  which would put us in W pressure group

In the event, we didn't have enough air for a 50 min dive including some time at 27 meters, and we came up from the first dive at 40 minutes, or 43 including the safety stop at 5 meters. But since we didn't have a wheel with us and couldn't recalculate, we went with the conservative measure and used that to calculate how long we could stay down on our next dive.  If we had a 2 hour surface interval and limited our next dive to 16 meters we would have 59 min dive time. As it turned out we went down with only 1:45 min surface interval which I realized as we were descending on the second dive.  But we were carrying tables with us and were able to recalculate as we descended that after surfacing from a first dive as W divers, with a 1:45 min surface interval, we would be ok at 16 meters with 55 min dive time.

I'm really cheeved at PADI for discontinuing production of the wheel, a remarkably versatile instrument for such situations.  The new electronic planner can't be taken underwater so it's impossible for beginners to recalculate on the fly underwater unless they are carrying computers, in which case no recalculations necessary. But there is great value I think in knowing how close you are to DCS, and in being able to visualize that, whether you have a computer or not.  Of course my computer was mostly showing 99 minutes of no-deco time on these dives, but if you're diving tables, then an electronic dive planner that can't be taken with you in the water is a really poor replacement for tables and wheels.

So much for the technicalities of our diving.  The dives themselves were not great but were pleasant and replete with fish.  On the first dive at Ras Sarkan we saw a large cow-tail ray trying to hide out in the sand.  The others on the boat saw turtles.  On the second dive at Lima Rock we saw not much more than a moray eel plus the other fish you normally see there, triggers, batfish, snappers, trevali, etc.  Vis wasn't great, the water was cool, but with 5 mm wetsuits we were fine. It was much colder up on the boat.

Seas were calm but skies were overcast.  That night it rained, and it was drizzling in the morning so the gear we cleaned and left out to dry stayed wet.  I had an email from Freestyle telling me they had cancelled their Inchcape trip for Saturday due to expected bad weather.  We assumed the UAE coast guard had restricted boating.  The Omanis don't impose such controls for Musandam but Nomad weren't going out either, except maybe to the caves, so Luke and I decided to make the best of a less than perfect situation and get home and do things we needed to get done back in the real world.  We re-booked our dives for the following weekend and headed back to Abu Dhabi.

To be continued (next week) ... 

Certified Tim and Laura Charge with Nomad Ocean Adventure December 8 thru 10, 2011

My logged dives #1101-1104

We had another lovely weekend in the company of our friends at Nomad Ocean Adventure this weekend. The occasion was the training of Laura and Tim Charge, recommended to me by Graham Mullen through the grapevine at the British Embassy. Laura and Tim agreed to do the elearning online and meet me at NOA on Thursday. Bobbi and I managed to get there by around 7:30 pm even though I had to go back to town and pick up my passport (new 3-year UAE visa!) and Bobbi who was able to get off work before 4 pm. We had to leave Nicki behind though, we would have arrived in Dibba too late for pool training, but she came up with Andy the next morning.

Laura and Tim had completed their test and form filling by the time I got there, so we were able to get confined water dive #1 done in the NOA pool Thu evening, before sitting down to a delicious meal of Mauritian cuisine. A winter chill has touched the evenings and mornings in the UAE and we had to get up at 7 am to do modules 2 and 3 in the icy pool, so we were tired before getting down to the harbor and motoring out to the dive sites mid-Musandam.

December 9 we went to Lima Rock and Ras Lima with Theo in charge. Vis was poor in both places. At Lima Rock we got our team into the water for what was actually my students' second time ever on Scuba since they had done a discover scuba course previously in Malaysia. Still they were well aware of their limitations. Plus to counter the cold 17 degrees in the pool and 24 degrees in the ocean, Laura and Bobbi and I all had 5 mm wetsuits which are like balloons in shallow depth, requiring more than the usual degree of buoyancy control, so the new divers were going up and down between our max depth at 16 meters and the surface whenever I led the dive shallow. Still we saw batfish being cleaned by blue wrasse, a copious variety of trigger fish, morays, and many more of the usual fish suspects. It was not an exciting dive for Bobbi and Nicki and I but Laura and Tim seemed to enjoy it. Their air lasted not bad for new divers, around 42 minutes, and when I took them up to the boat, Bobbi and Nicki waited for me below, since we three still had 100 bar. As I was delivering my student divers back onto the boat at the surface Theo warned me about a down current to the west of Lima Rock, the direction we were headed, and when I submerged I found Nicki and Bobbi not below me where I had left them but at the edge of my vis in that westerly direction. I was able to call them over and get them headed back to the east, the way we had come. Thus we dived another quarter hour without incident, apart from Nicki finding a nudibranch on a rock that I wouldn't have seen had I looked straight at it for 5 min, but she's good at spotting small stuff in busy backgrounds. Back on the surface, we heard tales of divers who had been swept deep by that swift westward down current, so lucky we turned back.

We motored over to Ras Lima for the surface interval and had lunch moving in and out of sunshine as the boat drifted into the shadow of the headland, and divers complained of cold and the boatmen moved out into the sun again. We did our dive from where we were on the headland. Bobbi and Nicki went on together and I took Laura and Tim to do some surface interval skills but conditions weren't right, there were stingers in the water, and we didn't accomplish them at the beginning of the dive. So we went underwater and did the dive #2 skill set, and then dived in shadow and through algae bloom in kind of dreary conditions, limiting ourselves to 14 meters. We had another 45 minute dive, relaxing, and with much better buoyancy control from Tim and Laura. When we surfaced the boat was nowhere to be seen. Conditions were better though, so we completed our surface skills there.

The boat ride home was cold so when we arrived back at our accommodation we just wanted hot showers and cold drinks, and then another great meal at NOA. There was a french group there who had been diving all week from Chris's place, showing slides each evening of what they had seen that day, and today one of them had promised photos of a 'petit poisson' which turned out to be a whale shark that just two of them had seen and photographed that day at Octopus Rock (not a good place to take beginners unfortunately).

The next morning we started again at 7 am, a lie in for Bobbi and I these days, with Laura and Tim doing much better in the pool than previously, completing the last two modules well before 10 am. An hour and a half later (after Pascal showed us where they hide the espresso machine at NOA) we were motoring off toward Lima Rock on an exceptionally lovely morning. Aliona was in charge of the diving for the day. The sea was calm and glassy, and we could see Lima Rock from just out of Dibba, the sky was so clear. Usually it's too hazy to see it before we reach Fishhead Rock.

We weren't actually going to Lima Rock through. We had mostly students and novices on board so we agreed to start in the protected bay on Ras Morovi. Aliona was proposing to lead the advanced divers out to a place where barracudas are almost always seen. I didn't know that spot and offered to take my students there by following Aliona as far as 18 meters. Most of the divers wanted to do something similar so they all went in the water together. Nicki and Bobb were in that group but delayed descent waiting for Tim and Laura and I, who were last in the water. When we were in position at the surface they had all gone down and we were set to follow, but we had adjusted weights in the pool that morning and despite best guesses for needs for an ocean dive. Laura was underweighted, and since the boat was right there and we hadn't descended yet, I surfaced and got 4 more kilos from the boat, stuck 3 in my pocket weight belt, and gave one to Laura, which made her descend perfaectly, but by then the divers had all gone. So we set out on our own dive.

It was a nice one and the best of the course. The coral at that spot is lovely, green whips, cabbage coral, purple soft corals, green tree coral, and coral boulders, all swarming with fish, triggers, big pufferes, surgeon tangs. I led into the sand looking for rays but turned back when we reached 18 meters. We continued a very pleasant dive, rounding the far underwater mountain, heading back to the north, and encountered Nicki, Bobbi, and Pascal, who were chasing a moses sole (flounder). I noticed then that my divers had gone down to nearly 50 bar, so I conducted them up the reef into the cabbage coral patch, sometimes a good place to see turtles. They controlled buoyancy sufficiently to make a safety stop there, and then I had them ascend on alternate air source. Their dive time was 31 minutes, 34 with the safety stop.

I still had 100 bar so I went back down to look for Bobbi and Nicki. On this foray I saw a turtle, and after I'd caught up with Nicki and Pascall, I spotted a scorpion fish hidden in the coral. Pascal photographed it and we all got a very close look..

Back on the boat, we had lunch against a setting of karst rocks rising from placid water, skies of blue, and warm sunshine to counter the chilly breezes. Winters in UAE can be quite pleasant.

We planned a last dive at Ras Sanut (Wonderwall) utilizing Nicki as divemaster. Nicki would go in first with her reel and set me up a line for CESA. Bobbi joined her at the surface and the students and I followed. I left Tim to do cramp removal, and weight and BCD replacement at the surface with Nicki while I took Laura down for her CESA. She was having ear problems and breathed on the ascent as often it happens that students need to repeat the exercise. She didn't want to do it right away because she seemed slightly overweighted. She was on her third BCD from NOA. All of them leaked and this one didn't support her properly at the surface, which contributed to her distress. So she gave her weight belt to Nicki to remove a weight while I took Tim down.

It wasn't that nice a dive actually. The algae was blocking out most of the light and there wasn't anything interesting to see apart from a moray eel. My students completed all their skills for dive number 4, Laura led us in a compass heading over the sand and back, and we carried on for half an hour underwater before people got cold and tired. When we surfaced we found we were last on the boat, so it was time to motor home to port, and from there drive 4 hours to reach our flat in Abu Dhabi, have dinner, and get 5 hours of solid sleep before crawling out of bed at 5 in the morning and head for work.