Happy Birthday Janet & Happy Anniversary Rosie & Charles

Up & raring to go we were at Crystal around 9.30 to meet Kiwi.  Back in classroom we started looking at BCD’s and were given the challenge of threading the tank strap back up in 2 minutes.  As I only remember doing this once I think in my DMT days, neither of us did it correctly or in the time DOH!   Oh well, after being shown, it just took seconds, at least now we will never forget ;-D

The next thing we looked at was the inflator hose buttons which we disassembled, checked, cleaned and reassembled.  Then we looked at dump valves, all in all very basic and straight forward to repair.

We then moved onto tanks.  All we could do with these was to service the actual tank valve by emptying the tank of air and then unscrewing the valve itself from the tank and disassembling the components inside, replacing all the Orings and giving each part a thorough clean before putting anything back together.

I’d like to spend a couple of days working on faulty dive equipment to make myself more familiar with all of the components as I found it really interesting.

Tonight is a group of DMT’s snorkel test, so we’ll pop down to watch that and then head home for another early night as we’ve signed up for the 7am boat

Last nights celebrations were brilliant.    Luca has no idea about his surprise party and the newly qualified instructors were on great form. It wasn’t our intention to stay out late but I think we left around midnight rather drunk whilst others went on elsewere.

I didnt feel too bad this morning surprisingly   ..by the time I got up it was 9ish, Si had already been out and bought provisions for breakfast, made tea and put Eastenders on for me.  How spoilt am I?!    After egg and soldiers we showered, dressed and rode to Crystal.   Today we were doing an equipment spec and servicing our regulators which was great fun.  Kiwi (Instructor from NZ) showed us how to disassemble, clean and replace parts in them and then we had to put them back
together.  Our Cressi regs we later found out are supposed to be serviced after every 50 dives, no wonder they’ve been acting up. 

After playing around and cleaning the individual parts  both of our regs were serviced so then we started on the faulty Crystal ones.  I got a reg that had a leaky depth guage which was only a matter of replacing a couple of O rings and Si got to take apart an Aqualung first stage which didn’t look as complicated as our Cressi’s but complicated enough …the next regulator I looked had a broken hose which  just a matter of unscrewing and replacing and both mouth pieces were wet breathing, basically letting in water as you breath, so we broke those down and replaced the rubber

All in all it was a great afternoon.  It’s great to know how exactly everything works and how to fix it.
Tomorrow we’ll be looking at BCD’s and tanks

Early night for us tonight!!

Apologies for the lack of daily updates.

The last few days have been pretty quiet so not much to write home about, plus the internet has been very flakey which is driving Simon crazy.  He’s trying to do his UK work and the connection keeps dropping out, so everything is taking twice as long   ….how frustrating is that?!

In the last few days we’ve had rain.  It’s been slightly overcast and has drizzled on the odd occasion but the other evening when we were at the Crystal bar waiting to watch the Open Water movie the wind came from nowhere, lightning tore up the sky and the heavens opened.  It was incredible.  The Crystal bar area is big and undercover but the wind was just driving the rain in and everyone ended up huddled in the most sheltered corner watching the movie on a tv, as everything was getting soaked and blown away. A few people just went out and sat in the sea, sipping their beers watching the lightshow  ..nutters!   Maybe next time though 😉

Anyway, we’ve had a couple of dives at ‘Junk Yard’ and found the smallest sweetlips ever.  It was so small that I thought it was plankton at first, how crazy is that?!  

Today when we went out, the longtail brokedown a hundred meters or so off the beach, so we all put our dive gear on and surface swam to ‘JunkYard’ while we left Nathan on the longtail, moored to a buoy. 

At Junk Yard, quite a few of the structures had come apart/fallen down due to the storm the other day, so we spent most of our time assembling them and moving the structures we’d dropped the day of the ‘Dive Clean Up’.    It was a productive dive and a long swim back.

Back at Crystal, Nath was sat down in pain as he had towed the longtail back on his own and put his back out, even for two people, that would have been a real struggle.    ..I think we’ll call him ‘Super Nath’ from now 🙂

Tonight it’s the newly qualified instructors celebration party as well as instructor Luca’s surprise birthday party.