Over the last few days, Divemaster trainee Lou has also completed her PADI Enriched Air and Deep Specialty courses with me.
We’ve had some excellent dives. The highlight for me was the first dive at Monad Shoal. About twenty minutes into the dive we had an excellent thresher shark encounter. A beautiful female shark was circling in front of us, being attended to by the local cleaner wrasse.
After about ten minutes or so she returned to the depths. This also signalled the end of the no-decompression limits for the air divers. Whilst those guys were on their way back to the line for their ascent, we were also graced by the presence of a huge manta ray. It swooped slowly in for a leisurely loop around the cleaning station before heading back out into the blue…
We were also fortunate enough to see three thresher sharks the following morning during our 40m dive. One at the very beginning of the dive before we reached our maximum depth, so I wasn’t sure if Lou’s big smile was shark or nitrogen narcosis induced. The other two were circling a cleaning station a little later in the dive. As we were diving on air for this dive, we ended up having to leave them to their cleaning ritual and head to the ascent line happy, but wishing we had a little more bottom time available…
In the next couple of days we’ll also be starting the PADI Wreck Specialty…