Suzanne, Cherri, Claire, Sheryl, Denise, Nicholas, Goh and my Rescue Diver student Vesi all boarded the Samudera Quest for a weekend of diving around Aur, Malaysia.
We dived, Lang, Pinnacle 2, Pinang, Captain’s Flat and a night dive at the house reef on Saturday. The viz was good at around 30 plus metres and the fish life was excellent with the usual suspects of rainbow runners, bat fish and trevally of all sorts just to mention a few.
The highlight would have to be the several huge humphead parrotfish that we saw, one poor bugger got himself right the middle of my group and he figured that the only way out was straight towards me. It scared the you know what out of me, this 100kgs 1.5m long fish heading at full speed at me, thankfully it turned at the last second and swam around me. The noise was incredible when it snapped its tail fin to hit high speed.
My Rescue Diver student was fully clothed and I took advantage of this and asked her if she was always ready to enter the water and rescue someone and during my briefing and other questions about what she would do if….. Suzanne, my victim was stung by a jelly fish whilst snorkeling (this is a drill not real) and started to panic.
Poor Vesi was forced to enter the water fully clothed to rescue the panicked diver. The rest of the weekend she was wearing swimmers under her clothes. Vesi completed the course with a few other senarios on Saturday and Sunday, well done Vesi.
Sunday we did two more dives with the highlight of the weekend at Crocodile Rock where saw two Hawksbill turtles. The first was sitting on the sand munching on some coral and my group had a great time watching it and taking photos for a good ten minutes. The second Turtle a much smaller one and was spotted by Nicholas. As soon as I saw it I thought it was stuck in the rock, there was also fish nets around the rock. I have rescued a stuck turtle at Bintan once before and thought that this Turtle was stuck too.
His head was sticking up through a hole in the rock and his shell looked to be caught in the net and the rock, so I jumped into “Turtle Rescue Mode” pulled it out of the rock and let it go thinking it would head to the surface for air… but instead it just swam around us for 5 more minutes before heading for air. Oops, I guess it was not stuck, or if it was it had only been there a short moment. Anyway, it created a lot of photo opportunities, which was not what I intended to do.
Back onboard we had lunch whilst the crew washed all our dive gear (thanks boys) and we settled in for the ride home in calm relaxing seas.