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Dive logs for Vance Stevens, P.A.D.I. Open Water SCUBA Instructor #64181
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Diving with: Moonlight Divers at Sawadi Beach
Resort |
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Conditions: day 1: mild seas |
Water Temp: 23°C below 12 meters |
Visibility: 3-4 meters at worst; 10 meters at best |
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Wetsuit combo: lycra suit and typhoon top |
Weight: needed: 6 kg |
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Time started: 10:21
Max depth: 26 meters
Dive time: 00:15 at 26 m.; 9 at 16 m. (as per profile so far).; 16 min. at 12
meters
Min Temp: 23 °C (est.)
Nitrox 21% (normal air), No stop
Hayut Island, with the Oman military post
Started off diving into a crowd who’d gone
down before us. Scurried to get ahead
of them in case there were any leopard sharks further up and found out later
they were gathered around a sting ray.
These divers also reported seeing turtles and sea snakes. Us, we wandered along at depth for most of
15 min peering hopefully into the gloom until coming upon a honeycomb moray
sprawled lengthwise under an outcrop.
This set the tone for our enjoyment of the remainder of the dive, since
we say more of those big honeycombs and other morays but not much else in the
way of big fish. We saw a sweet lips
and a plethora of the usual little reef fishies, and some attractive soft
purple and blue and orange corals, but other than fair vis and pretty diving,
nothing great. Russell ran out of air
after 40 min and Glenn was underweighted in an unfamiliar wetsuit so when
Russell went up, Glenn joined him inadvertently, and we couldn’t get Glenn
weighted and down fast enough to continue the dive, with ten min. remaining
before our 50 min. was up. By then the
boat that picked up Russell had drifted off the shallow dive spot, and I
realized that when I saw Glenn’s spare weight go fluttering into the depths.
Time out: 11:01
Surface Interval: 1 hour 52 minutes
During snorkel at interval, saw a resting brown speckled ray, a moray, a trigger fish trying to act nonchalant and then go after little fish that always escaped, and a gobie with a shrimp doing construction work
Garden of Eden corner, very poor vis for
Garden of Eden
Planned dives using wheel; assuming we’re
C divers at this point
Time started: 12:53
Max depth: 18 meters
Dive time: 00:30 at 15-18 m.; 20 min at 12 m. (as per profile)
Min Temp: 23 °C (est.)
Nitrox 21% (normal air), No stop
This dive started out with shit vis,
really bad, hard enough to see each other let alone much in the water. We were to run up to a corner to the east
and turn it south, and it’s a good thing we took bearings, because we were on
them most of the way to the corner. We gave ourselves 30 min at depth and we
spent this time running over rubble at 16 to 18 meters on the lookout for
leopard sharks of course, and the black tips Naseeb said might be there, but of
course, no way to see outlyers in the murk.
So we headed in and found some alcoves and other divers, and then it got
more interesting but cold till we multileveled above the thermocline at 12
meters. Finally we turned the corner
into warm water and found clear vis for the last ten minutes of the dive. Here a sting ray wafted in front of us, and
further ahead a honeycomb caught my eye, and there turned out to be a sting ray
in the rock behind him. The rocks were
full of honeycomb and grey morays, and ahead I saw a turtle, which swam off
when I clacked. This was good leopard
shark land, with boulders and coral strewn about a sand surface in green water,
but we ran out of time before we ran out of air. I insisted we surface, but when we did there was no boat, and
when the boat appeared other divers weren’t on it, so no one had been following
the clocks all that closely. So it
turned out to be a great dive, but only in the last ten minutes.
Hotel Log: The Sawadi Beach Resort has
some odd things about it. When you eat
in the coffee shop restaurant, great buffet, but the phone rings time after
time in the most irritating ring that goes on and on because there’s only one
staff person there and if he’s busy or has stepped out a minute, then the
ringing is like a drilling. First
person in the shower figures out when the water comes cold that there must be a
switch on the wall somewhere, which there is.
Too bad there’s not a note about it so you would know to switch on the
hot water before your shower. The a/c
at night goes on and off at ten minute intervals, and there’s a note on the
control to leave it set at 23. You
can’t figure out in the middle of the night how to work the remote. The dive package is now breakfast, dinner
and snacks on the boat. Snack on the
boat is a piece of cake. Leaves gaps by
dinnertime. And of course, there’s the
unhappy hour which starts just before you can possibly get your dive gear
cleaned. No beer is supposed to be
served from 3 to 6. But the bar staff
by the pool have always agreed to serve a “last call” for us salty mouthed
divers even if we miss the 3 p.m. deadline by 15 min. They have to get an ok from a manager, though.
Planned dives using wheel; we’d planned to
go 26 but the dive site was changed as we were about to kit up from (?)ed
Island to the back side of Jun and as far as possible to the last rock to the
east and then diving east from there along the submerged reef, and this dive
was just 22 meters.
Time started:
Max depth: 22 meters
Dive time: 50 min
Min Temp: 23 °C (est.)
Nitrox 21% (normal air), No stop
On this one, Bertrand joined Russell and
Glenn and I. This was a rather nice
dive. We skirted at depth along the 22
meter point finding things like flounder and morays. The best find was a huge bull ray resting until we came along and
disturbed it, though it took its time moving away from us. 40 min into the dive Bertrand surfaced and
waved goodbye and Glenn and Russell and I continued at 16 meters on the top of
the reef. It was lovely up there with
current bringing in lots of barracuda, and a feather tailed ray gliding along. We circled among the barracuda till time to
come up ourselves. This was the best of
our dives.
Planned dives using wheel; started dive as
C divers with 20 min at 22 meters, 15 min at 16 meters, 50 min at 12
Time started: 12:55
Max depth: 20 meters
Dive time: 45 min
Min Temp: 23 °C (est.)
Nitrox 21% (normal air), No stop
We returned to (?)ed island after the surface interval, where we should have dived that morning. By now we were at slack tide and this site, which has always been hopping every time I visited it, was kinda tame without current. I’ve always seen leopard sharks here but not this time.
One nice find was two big honeycomb morays poking like puppy dogs from a rock. Bertrand stopped to take a picture. Other than a lot more rays there wasn’t much else to see besides pretty fish and corals.
Vance Stevens, vstevens@emirates.net.ae
| http://www.vancestevens.com/
August 18, 2000 in Word 2000 (by mistake)
Readers, let me know if you find broken links. Word 2000 reverses slashes of its own volition I think so that it
can follow paths that are in this way rendered un-navigable by Netscape. My attempts to change them back in Word are
automatically undone by this rather poor web editing tool. I certainly don’t appreciate the extra work
this causes me nor the inconvenience it causes my readers, but let me know if
you encounter any of these so I can fix them in a decent web editor. Thanks, Vance