The second day of the course we met again at 9am and did a quick 30 question quiz to test what we had learnt the morning before. It was all quite simple really, mostly simple physics with a good splash of common sense. After that, we boarded a coach to the nearby Shark Bay. Luckily, we were told its naming wasn’t to do with sharks in the area, but that the largest fish caught during one of its first days as a fishing village was a shark. Here we were expecting two dives in the sea to qualify as scuba divers.

Driving out of the hotel gate, we were met instantaneously with baron desert. There were a few hotels still under construction but it was mostly just nothingness.

We reached Sharks Bay, and chose a spot on a sun bed while our equipment was sorted out. After checking through everything and receiving a final briefing, we were wading out into the sea before fitting fins and mask, then descending into the sea for 35 minutes. We went down to a maximum of ten minutes for this first dive where we just swam around getting used to the very salty sea – very different to a swimming pool! The whole of the group was very shocked about half way through the dive to see a turtle feeding on a piece of coral ahead of us. We were with the photographer at the time so we managed to get a few good photos of this. The variety of fish was quite large, and although I can’t really say I am interested in fish, it was very interesting just to float weightlessly and watch them swimming amongst the coral.

Unsurprisingly, the air was nearly gone after 35 minutes under so we headed back to the beach. Yesterday, we managed to go for two hours on a full tank because we were just sitting on the bottom for most of it doing exercises; this time we were continuously swimming about investigating the depths of the bay.

After an hour break for lunch, we put on our equipment again. This time we didn’t go so deep, max 8m. We spent about 40 minutes doing the exercises again in a little alcove in the coral. It was quite amusing to see all the fish swimming up to us while the group was kneeling still on the sandy bottom. After we had finished, we had a swim about for a while then returned to the beach where we received our diving logbooks and filled in forms for our certificate which would be sent to our home addresses.

So now that means i’m a qualified PADI scuba diver. Just need to find somewhere close to home that will let me keep it up.