I Like Turtles

I was down at the scuba office at 8:30. Charley, clearly the boss, wasn't there, but the guys seemed to think they could give me the cash back later. We were headed to Mnemba, the same island we'd been moored off for the snorkeling. As I mentioned, the island is very exclusive, the preserve of the rich and famous. The dive master told us that there are a number of bungalows, and that each one has a private boat and its own dive master. Incredible, really.

There were five of us diving, and one snorkelling. There were three Irish girls all travelling together – one, like me, had done five or six dives. The others were doing a 'try dive'. Of the French couple with us, the guy had, apparently, done over four hundred dives. I mean, how? Our dive master was from Zanzibar, and spoke reasonable English. Since we'd not dived for six months, we were required to do a 'check dive'. I have to say the fact that they charged me 20US for this annoyed me a bit, since it consisted of a ten minute chat in the boat, then five minutes sat on the bottom doing basic exercises before we headed off on the dive proper. Bit of a swiz, f you ask me.

Anyway, the scenery was amazing, and so, so many fish. We swam down an incline to about eighteen metres, then along a coral wall. Quite magical, and I've decided that there's room in my life for both scuba and freediving (move up, kayaking). The Irish girl, though, ran out of air unusually quickly. She'd not got the hang of the buoyancy, so had expended a lot of air getting that right, then had been breathing quite hard. It's a beginner's error, and I did something very similar the last time. The french guy had 140 left, I had 110 left, she was on 60. When she hit 50bar, the instructor buddied with her for the rest of the dive so we didn't have to come up early. It wasn’t a problem at all. Still, when we surfaced she was clearly a bit embarrassed. I explained to her that, in my opinion, she'd been completely honest about her experience, so it was up to the dive master to manage it. Not only that, I was more than happy to come up when we did, and while we could have stayed down another ten minutes, it was enough for me. She was talking about not going down for the second dive because she didn't want to 'spoil it for the rest of us', but I told her she'd paid and that the professionals would sort it out.

Sure enough, that afternoon, two instructors came down with us. This was a 'drag' dive, with the dive master towing a a buoy on the surface. We even saw a sea turtle, which was fantastic – and much bigger than I expected. I was mildly annoyed that I eventually had to grab the dive master's leg when I was down to 50bar, since I feel he should have checked earlier. The Irish girl had the same amount of air left as me, suggesting this morning had been an anomaly. Together with a third Dutch girl that had joined us, we surfaced slowly with the other instructor, leaving Jacque Cousteau to continue for another fifteen minutes. Everyone happy.

We all talked on the way back, and it turns out that the Irish girls are part of a group of six all on a Toucan Travel truck, parked at Mikardi. They were heading back the next morning, so I agreed to share their minibus.

So, a great day, and I'm glad I did it. After much screwing around, enough people paid with cash to give me cash back, so I'm solvent again. Right, got to go find Margrett and get food. Zanzibar sucks.