It was a very busy and noisy weekend with 12 school kids. We boarded the bus Friday night at Riverwalk, Singapore and we were bound for Mersing, Malaysia to catch a ferry to Pulau Aur. There was non stop chatter and excited laughter.
We finally made it to Pulau Aur around 4am. We managed to get some sleep on the ferry and were also able to grab a couple of hours of extra sleep in our cabins before our first dive on Saturday. This picture shows our resort during daylight hours.
Phil and Georgie were looking after the 6 PADI Open Water Students, Emily, Kimberly, Ernest, Tanya, Brandon and Haryono. They completed 3 platform dives on Saturday and one boat dive on Sunday. I joined them for the boat dive and was very pleased to see that they were pretty good divers. Some small sand storms that had to be corrected, but other than that they are good divers as far as newbies go. It is so nice to show people cool things. During the boat dive, the cuttlefish that I saw a couple of weeks ago (click here for 2-4 March Trip Report) were still at the same place doing the same thing.
I had 5 PADI Advanced Open Water Students, Cherilynn, Crystal, Natasha, Julius and Ignatius. Shoa Lun followed us as a leisure diver. The guys did extremely well, even at Captain’s Point during the deep dive where we experienced some downward current and had to fin alot to get back to shallow water. We also completed the navigation, drift, fish ID and night dives.
The navigation was the best I have seen in a long time. They did perfect squares with almost perfect equal lengths to each side. The fish ID dive was fun and some of the fish drawings were good and some not so good. The night dive was also good with a stone fish right near the down line and loads of other fish. Unfortunately, we did not see the big school of humpheads at Rayners Rock, this weekend.
We made it back to Singapore Sunday night around 9pm, everyone was tired but had a great weekend. Mel and Shelby also managed some dives and snorkeling from the platform.
Gary