Pulau Dayang Trip

Back from my trip all too soon! It was pretty fun, really. And made some new friends too.

Spent Fri night traveling to Mersing to catch the 4 hour ferry to Pulau Dayang. Much of the time was wasted as usual at Customs, and we eventually reached the resort at fricking 5am on Sat! Which leaves 3 hrs of sleep on a bed before diving. Well actually I suspect I got like 7 or 8 hours of sleep in total, since I just snapped into sleep mode in the van. It was a minivan that seats 10, and we had a driver from hell. I figured if I were to die when the van flips over, I might as well be blissfully ignorant in sleep till the last minute.

Day 1 (Sat)



Started off with our first open water dive at 9am! It was slightly scary at first, but the divemasters had already tied a rope so we could descend and guide ourselves using it. Landed at 5 metres next to a gigantic Porites coral full of christmas tree worms and did the usual mundane homework like partial and full mask flooding and clearing, and finding the mouthpiece if it gets knocked out from you. Couple of our mates got a little ill after that dive, but a little Stugeron soon put that right! Haha, so atypical to whip out the high class drugs. That being said, I *did* bring Maxolon just in case anyone was just very slightly ill. Oooh and we went on an excursion after doing the homework, and hovered around the reefs with sightings of 2 humphead parrotfish and a moray eel.



Second dive was just blah, although the instructor pointed out a triggerfish that no one could see. He gestured triggering a handgun, but I mistook it as "there's someone spearfishing over there" and promptly finned away as far as I could so I won't get shot. Duh. Practiced the dreaded lost-face-mask thing, and also the out of air drill where we share air.



Third dive was scary but the most exciting of the day. Waters were choppy, it was dark and rainy and at that twilight zone just before it got dark. We practiced emergency ascent, then YX and I went scooting around with Giovanni - good thing too, cos he spotted a cuttlefish! Hee hee .. we got back into the boat feeling all smug about it.



Had our written exam after dinner. Irksome to complete 100 MCQ questions.



Day 2

OMG. The early morning dive at 7am! This time the location was a reef slope that was f*cking scary. It slopes down 45 degrees into a patch of dark greyish-blue, and this time we descended to a full 18 metres. It was a desolate but lovely place though, if you know where to look. We spotted 2 huge pufferfish and loads of pretty little nudibranchs all over the floor. I kinda messed up during this dive. At around our destination, I suddenly went into an uncontrolled ascent. Eeeeeeeeks. For some reason, I just couldn't sink!! Emptied all the air out from my vest and exhaled fully, but I was still shooting upwards. Luckily YX saw me and came to the rescue, but in the end we just gave up and broke the surface. It wasn't disastrous, thankfully, since it happened when we were like only 4 metres. So, great. Now we ended up in a patch of water with hundreds of tiny, 1-2cm transparent jellyfish. They didn't sting though! Had to practice some very grotesque surface skills (drank loads of seawater while doing them) like taking off the entire tank apparatus and putting it back again, and then crawled back up the beach.



Our last dive was absolutely lovely. It was at this area called Crocodile Rock and had an amazing diversity of stuff. It wasn't the typical stony reef - more like a mixed reef picture with large boulders full of soft corals and seafans, interspersed with patches of stony corals. Managed to see a blue-spotted stingray and an adult orbiculate batfish. The area was littered with loads of crinoids! Nice black-and-white feather stars. We also stashed up some bread mash in my wetsuit, so we were able to feed the fish as we dived. Went pretty deep and actually past the safety limit (oops), so ended up doing a decompression stop at 5 metres while practicing the oh-so-elusive "floating buddha" technique (hovering in mid-water without going upwards or downwards). Only problem was I probably suffered a reverse block while going up - where the previously-compressed air in my sinuses expanded, and was really quite ill with a blocked nose and headache to boot.

Nursing a scrape from some corals ...




YX and I have pretty much decided to hold off doing an advanced open water course for now - we're certified to go down to 18 metres, and that's about plenty to access most dive sites on reefs around SE Asia. At least, we're not that keen on spooky things like wrecks, just reefs. In fact, most of the pretty stuff we saw were no more than 8 metres down. And it comes at an advantage too - less surface time needed to detox from the dissolved nitrogen, and rarely the need to make decompression stops so that'll mean more dives. It's actually quite addictive - looking out for free weekends to go on short trips! And of course, we'll need to invest in an average underwater camera housing.

Wenky
1:26 AM

Wenky
3:47 PM

Wenky
6:56 AM