Alice in Wonderland Wednesday

Curieuse island has a lot of tourists visiting. Some will walk straight come past the camp, some hang around and have a chat with us, but today we were in for a surprise. Just in front of camp on the beach, is a swing. A couple today decided this would be an ideal spot for a nude photo-shoot. This carried on for about 15 mins with us all staring at them. They didn’t seem phased at all.

My illness has developed into full blown man flu, runny nose and everything. I was not the only one feeling sick today. Three others in the group all had to give diving a miss.

We finished our EFR course today with Secondary Response and wrote the exam. It very basic stuff, but is required for Rescue Diver.

Some more drama went down today. I swear this camp is becoming more like “Survivor” each day, some people are already wishing we could vote people off the island. One of the guys here is like a 2 year old and doesn’t play nice with the other kids. I don’t really know what could help the situation, and I see it getting worse before it gets better.

Top Gun Tuesday

We were introduced to a new member of the GVI team today. Annie the CPR dummy. This morning was spent learning emergency first response, the “A,B,C, D, S” now called “C,A,B,D,S” after a change to place more focus on starting the compressions as soon as possible. It was actually a lot of fun and valuable should we ever be put in an emergency situation.

I think I may be coming down with a cold. Woke up today with a sore throat and runny nose. On the dive today it was quite painful equalising. Taken some Vitamin C for now. Apparently April has the same thing. Let’s hope I can still dive tomorrow.

Living together as a group has some challenges and it’s there are some issues we’ve come across already. This morning the kitchen was left in quite a state, not this first time this has happened. The people responsible for the clean up last night were told to finish the job properly. One of them, no names mentioned, started sulking and acting like a 2 year old, child. We also have 19 softdrinks and 6 beers unaccounted for which I don’t think is people just forgetting to write it down.

Really starting to miss the family, friends and Lisa. It just too expensive to phone and I have to wait for the weekend to get airtime/credit.

Megafauna Monday

All of us woke up to Emma’s blood curdling screaming, thinking a rat must have crawled onto her. Rachel asked if she was ok and Emma told her not to worry about. We asked Emma later in the morning what it was all about and she doesn’t even remember it.

Today’s agenda was quite chilled, starting off with scrubbing the algae of Dexter (our boat). I even managed to get through a movie while and working the compressor and chilling. I only had one dive that was just another coral spot. We have to get our spots right 3 times in a rows before we can be signed off and start surveying.

One of the other dive groups saw a school of kingfish hunting snapper with a whitetip shark. Another group spotted some big tuna.

Sunday in La Digue

Woke up with a thumping headache after all the beers last night. The morning was spent reminiscing about last night and ripping off Harry.

The whole group headed off to Anse Grande again. One of the things everyone has to do in La Digue is stop off at the road side stand that makes ice cold fruit smoothies. The stand is just on near the top of the massive hill you have to climb on your bike and is hard to miss. The guy has all his fruit out and two blenders. It is the best 45 Rupee I spent in La Digue.

Steve managed to fall of his bike and ended up in hospital. To be honest it was completely unnecessary as it was just a few grazes.

I was a bit sad having to leave La Digue but we all agreed that it won’t be long before we’re back there again.

Saturday in La Digue

Calum managed to organise one of the locals to take us to La Digue in his boat at the same price as it would cost us to take a taxi and ferry from Pralin (30 Euro). We’re staying in a place that cost about 250 Rupee a night and has hot showers and aircon, the only down side is that there is only one room with separate twin beds and the rest have doubles, which means us guys may need to bunk up, which will never happen so I’ve asked them for a mattress to throw down on the floor.

The two main ways of getting around La Digue is by bicycle and ox-drawn carts. Only in the lat year have they introduced cars to the island. To hire a bike costs 200 Rupee for the weekend and they even come with gears and working breaks.

Anse Grande is one of the top beaches on La Digue, so that was first on my places to go. The beach is on the other side of the island and getting there requires a ride over the mountain. My bike had only three gears so it made things interesting. After 20mins I was greeting by palms trees, white sand and a beautiful turquoise sea. The beach has warning signs against swimming there because it has a crazy shore break. Later on I put my mask on and went for a snorkel around the point. The vis was incredible, about 30+ meters and the water was teaming with big Parrot fish, rockcod and wrasse.

The whole groups started the evening off with sunset cocktails at on of the beach bars then we had dinner cooked by the owner of the place we were staying at. Calum who had been there before highly recommended that we try her cooking, we did and it was incredible. It consisted of grilled Red Snapper, sour pumpkin and octopus curry. Dessert was pineapple with a sweet syrup .

The evenings entertainment was “Extra”, a local club with a disco look and feel. There’s a 50 Rupee cover charge but no dress code. I spent most of the night bare-foot and in boardshorts. The music was definitely island style and very hard to explain, if you think Bob Marley mixed with a Salsa tempo then you’re on the right track. The local are friendly but towards toward the end of the night the start becoming very forward with the ladies. I spent most of the night rescuing the girls in our group from the local guys. Got my death stare down to an art. The first hook-up on the programme happened between Harry and a girl from the group (can’t mention names).

Fast Food Friday

We do have some luxuries at the camp, although it may not seem so to others. Each week a tuck box is stocked with chocolate, peanuts, chips and other snacks. The fridge is also stocked with softdrinks (glass bottles) and beers. A list is drawn up where we just tick what we take and settle it at the end of the week. These two luxuries may have me rolling back home when I leave. I’ve managed to have a chocolate at least once a day and still believe that the is nothing better in the world than coming back from a dive and knocking back a nice refreshing fruit cocktail drink.

Today we dove a coral spot at Coral Gardens. The visibility was an amazing 20+ meters, best visibility we’ve had so far. On our dive we didn’t see much other than corals but on one of the later dives they had dolphins swim past them as well as an eagle ray (so jealous!).

Tonight Friday night theme was Hawaiian. Guys went all out with floral shirts and girls with flowers in their hair and sarongs. Everyone got fairly hammered but Tess and Harry were well beyond the rest, pulling out all the moves including a hilarious version of the worm and a move that we named “the manta”

A young french crowd heard our music from their yacht and decided to come join us. In doing so they forgot to secure their dingy and the staff had had to rescue it after it drifted out to sea at about 1am.

Thriller Thursday

Today was a crazy day, firstly because it was the first day that I had two dives and secondly because I had the best dive while I’ve been here. Trying to manage all our duties, plus study our last set of corals and squeeze in 2 dives means there is absolutely no free time in the day. But after a hard long day by 6pm I’ve had my shower and am now chilling in the hammock looking out at a sea that hardly has a ripple on it. These are definitely the good times.

My fist dive today was another research diver practical. We had to lay a 50m intersect line and count the coral diversity within 2.5m each side of the line. This may sound easy but underwater with a lot of surge makes this very difficult.

My second dive was a spot dive with April as our DM. We dove Point Rouge, which is a granite dive site just off a tiny island. It drops off steeply into the sea to about 10m, creating the most beautiful ridges and canyons that our lined with coral. We dove at about 3:30pm so the light underwater was scattered rays making the scene quite surreal. The highlight of my dive was however the eagle ray, southern Pompano (also known as Permit) and a White-tip Reef Shark. The eagle ray had about a meter wing span as gently glided past us. The Pompana were enormous, about 10 of them ranging between the 15 to 20kg ranges, much larger than the ones in captivity at the Durban aquarium. They would swim past within a meter of us, not fazed at all.

April is one of those divers who is just as interested in fish as she is in coral and will often get the coral spots done early in the dive so we can look around and enjoy the rest of our dive. She also gets heavily involved in searching for sharks, looking for whitetips in every cave. On this dive she spotted one that was just under 2m. What an amazing creature. After seeing it, April and I signalled to each other that we should have brought out camera’s.

Watersports Wednesday

Today was my turn to go do the weekly shopping on Pralin. The shop was similar to one of the local spaza shops in South Africa. It had almost everything, except a lot of fresh vegetables, choice here was limited. The store opens anytime between 8 and 9am and by the time the shop opens the local alcoholics are already queuing at the door.

There is a term widely adopted at camp “food porn”. This came about from our daily discussions about the food we were craving. Mine is always a nice piece of meat with spinach, other food porn included bacon sandwiches, burgers, ice-cream and a fresh Greek salad.

Emily, one of the instructors from the Mahe camp came over to start training us for our advanced research diver qualification. She was telling us about how their food is not nearly as good as ours because they have to cook for 30 people. This is after she had another one of the amazing meals cooked by our hut, consisting of barbequed Job fish, corn fritters, homemade bread, butternut and mashed potato.

Totally Tropical Tuesday

Rachel had her 3rd sleepless night because of tooth-ache. I’ve given her my anti-inflammatories but they only seem to work for a max two hours. Its actually gotten to a point where we all think she needs to go to the dentist. So she’s going to go with the Pralin tomorrow and visit the dentist while the weekly shopping gets done.

Did another spot dive today at coral gardens. Unfortunately we got dropped on the sand and had to find the reef. Only towards the end of the dive did we come across the main reef. The other group that went down found an awesome spot, filled with schooling snapper and kingies. Everyone come up saying that they just had the best dive ever.

One of the staff, Calum, is like the Dr Do-little of the sea and megafauna are just attracted to him. He’s seen 11 whale sharks in one day before and 90% of the megafauna sitings logged have been logged by him. His dive group today saw dolphins. I’ve decided that when I get a chance to take my camera diving he has to be on the same dive.

We’ve all decided that this coming weekend might be good to visit La Digue. Calum and Ellie have both mentioned some places we can stay and if we do it as a group it won’t be expensive

Musical Monday

I’m starting to look a bit like a pinch-cushion, waking up in the middle of the night in a scratching, itchy frenzy. I think these mosquitoes are building up an immunity to all the bug spray.

We started the first Monday “Camp Clean” where we would unpack everything in the kitchen and clean it. While doing so we discovered another rats nest under one of the pots, with a special surprise of maggots. Got thing I didn’t have to clean it. Instead I was throwing out rotten fruit and vegetables.

I did another coral spot dive on APC, ticking off some more corals. We’re going through our next set of families tomorrow.

When I wasn’t diving I spent most of my time in the kitchen. We cooked noodles and stirfry for lunch then went all out and did pizzas for supper. (We’re definitely the better hut when it comes to cooking).

Harry got stomach cramps. We all recon they are because was picking up the chickens today and may have picked up a parasite. Lets hope that not the case.