Saturday, August 14, 2010

Diving in Malaysia: live aboard


Friday evening, off work at 5pm to get to the other side of the island to get on the DiveRace boat which is going to take us diving for the next 3 days (Monday is a bank holiday) around tioman.
The boat is great, about 20 divers on it plus 8 staff.
We departe around 7.30 and need 2 attempts to clear immigration but finally we are on our way and we get our first lovely dinner. We are in bed early because of the 4h of sleep of the night before and because diving is for people who get up early!
For the next 3 days, our life is a succession of dive, food and sleep! 4 dives the first day, only 3 for me as I'm not allowed to do night dive yet (another reason to get my advanced open water padi).

No issues today, ears are fine, I have plenty of weight and I'm getting a bit more confident under R's supervision!
2nd day is a big day we are visiting 2 wrecks, there are my first ones! The first one Kuantan wreck is an oil tanker, the 2nd one is a Japanese vessel which sank during the 2nd world war. There are both very impressive, one has a bit of oil leaking, the other one still has bombs and canon! We were supposed to do 2 dives on the oil tanker, unfortunately, my ears decided that 1 was enough so R had to find another buddy. I already had equipment issues on the 1st one, it was not a good day...
Third day started quite painfully, carrying so much equipment and weight wasn't my back cup of tea! Anyway, only 2 dives on this last day, not the best ones, quite poor visibility and no more turtles :-( By lunch time, the diving is over and we start making our way south to Singapore.

We finally arrive around 9.30pm to find the city still blocked in several places after the national day parade!

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