Blue Ventures Field Diary

By Liz Griffths

We are now half way through our six week exped­i­tion. Last week, the few dive ‘begin­ners’ amongst us sat (and passed) our PADI Open Water exam. Three of us then car­ried on to com­plete the PADI Advanced Open Water course. This second course involved a series of five dives focus­sing on spe­cific skills, sup­por­ted by the­ory classes. It was a rather enter­tain­ing few days. Our first dive was Peak Per­form­ance Buoy­ancy, which was aimed squarely at our newly developed habits of crash­ing into any­thing and everything that was around us, par­tic­u­larly our sur­round­ing envir­on­ment. As usual, Axelle, our instructor, made the vari­ous exer­cises look easier they were. While she and Bic, the dive man­ager, hovered just above our heads, we thrashed and crashed near the bot­tom, try­ing des­per­ately to con­trol a small ascent and des­cent with just our lungs. The erup­tions of bubbles from their reg­u­lat­ors let us know we’d kept them enter­tained. Even­tu­ally, our patience tested, we man­aged the Holy Grail of the hover. Admit­tedly, it was more upside-down turtle than upright yoga pose, but close enough.
The next day was our deep dive to 30 meters. It was a beau­ti­ful site, full of diverse and col­our­ful coral and much big­ger fish. It was darker, slightly colder and had the feel­ing of def­in­itely being ‘out at sea’.
Our third dive, Under­wa­ter Nav­ig­a­tion, was always going to be prob­lem­atic. I can’t nav­ig­ate my way out of a paper bag. I get lost on a straight road. North and south mean abso­lutely noth­ing to me. A com­pass? You have to be kid­ding. As I struggle with nav­ig­a­tion at the best of times on land, I had sig­ni­fic­ant con­cerns about how I was going to cope with simple under­wa­ter nav­ig­a­tion at 12 meters. Our exer­cises for this dive had us work­ing to find cer­tain co-ordinates and routes, count­ing fin-kicks and speed of swim­ming to nav­ig­ate dis­tance and time. There were sev­eral moments where we would stare at our com­pass, tap it a few times, stare at each other, shake our heads, shrug our shoulders. No idea where we were. Luck­ily, our instruct­ors did. With a bit more patience and per­sever­ance, and the occa­sional frus­trated attempt to throw away my com­pass, (I’m sure it was broken) we man­aged to find our way. I say ‘find’ our way, as nav­ig­ate is prob­ably too euphemistic for what we did. Any­way, more prac­tising, more per­sever­ance, more blank stares at the com­pass. We learnt it in the end. I also learnt that it’s quite hard to swear with a reg­u­lator in your mouth.
The next dive, rather iron­ic­ally, was Search and Recov­ery. Given how chal­len­ging I found the under­wa­ter nav­ig­a­tion, the idea that I might ever actu­ally be able to find any­thing under­wa­ter had me in stitches. But, armed with a range of tech­niques we had prac­tised before­hand on land (includ­ing a knot tying exer­cise that took us all the best part of the morn­ing to get right), we set about find­ing the newly hid­den treas­ure. Luck­ily, I got to swim around in circles look­ing for mine. Quite appro­pri­ate, really.
Our last dive before we qual­i­fied for our Advanced course would be a night dive, con­duc­ted in the very early hours of the fol­low­ing morn­ing. There we were at 3:30am, strug­gling into wet­suits, fum­bling with BCDs and reg­u­lat­ors, and stomp­ing down to the boat with noth­ing but the stars to guide us. Night time really is pitch black in Andavadoake. There are no street lights, no house lights, no soft glow of far off vil­lages or cit­ies to guide us. It was pitch black. Torches in hand, we rolled into the water, swal­low­ing the odd moment of fear with our air. The sea at night really is another world. Calm, quiet, eery. We didn’t see a great deal, thanks to us land­ing off the reef and spend­ing most of the dive time look­ing for the right site. But we had a few fish to keep us com­pany, and a bar­racuda fol­lowed us for a while, keep­ing tabs on where we were head­ing. Back on land, we took in the sun­rise with cof­fee and bok bok (sweet, fried bread). And that was it — after that dive and a few more the­ory ses­sions, we were newly qual­i­fied Advanced Open Water divers.
The rest of the week has passed in a blur. In addi­tion to passing our two dive courses, we have all now passed our two benthic tests (a classroom test, and a point-out test in the water). We’ve been learn­ing our fishes (there are a lot!) and slowly get­ting ourselves ready to sit the fish tests. We are all now keen to get the sci­ence train­ing out the way so we can start being a bit more use­ful on our dives.
In between all of this, we’ve had plenty of time to sit around, read, soak up a little sun (yes, Mum, I’m wear­ing sun­screen) and start to get involved in some of the other pro­jects that the BV team has on the go. The main one, last Sat­urday, was the Eng­lish les­son with a group of school chil­dren. BV has run Eng­lish les­sons for quite some time, but due to the lack of volun­teers over the last few months, they’ve slipped away.
Thanks to the help of Liz, an ex-physical edu­ca­tion teacher from Aus­tralia, we held an after­noon of tabloid sports for 75 kids. In the court­yard of their school, we divided the kids into groups, gave each group a sta­tion and ball game of some sort with which to score points. After 3 minutes, all teams changed loc­a­tions. They loved it. We used the exer­cises to help teach them Eng­lish words, num­bers and phrases and to encour­age team­work, rather than indi­vidual com­pet­ive­ness. It was a great after­noon, if not hot and exhaust­ing.
We’ve been the bene­fi­ciar­ies of les­sons too, with Bic giv­ing us our first Mala­gasy les­son and Chiara hold­ing a lec­ture on coral repro­duc­tion. Today we have a ses­sion with Mag­gie, who is tak­ing us through the fam­ily plan­ning clinic pro­gramme and how BV is try­ing to help the vil­lage man­age its extreme pop­u­la­tion growth.
On our day off last week, we hired two pirogues and headed to the edge of the reef, where 25–30 can­nons lay bur­ied in water shal­low enough in which to snorkel. It was an incred­ible day. Pirogue is now my favoured way of trav­el­ling and the coral that lies just bey­ond the reef, to where we swam, was incred­ible. Huge val­leys with soft sandy bot­toms, steep coral cliffs and ledges hid all sorts of beau­ti­ful, col­our­ful fish. We’re get­ting bet­ter at nam­ing them. The Aus­sie fam­ily, fish experts includ­ing the kids, can name most of what they see. Rob and I are still stag­ger­ing some­where back at the gen­eral spe­cies. “It’s a fish, I know that much…”. But, hope­fully, if we study hard we should be fish trained in the next few days and then the real work begins.

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