Diving in Eilat – Advanced Open Water Day 1

Diving in Eilat – Advanced Open Water Day 1

Eilat, Israel, Asia

Today was my first day of diving in Eilat, and it was awesome! My instructor, Yaniv, picked me up from the hostel at 8:45am and we headed straight down the South Beach. Yaniv is awesome. I was lucky enough to be the only person on my Advanced Open Water course, it was excellent. Every other course I’ve been on has been with six to twelve other people, so you don’t get that personal attention that might be needed. Well that wasn’t a problem I had to deal with.

We started out by filling out all the paperwork, getting my gear together and then going through a briefing for our first dive. I chose to go for a Peak Personal Buoyancy course first, so I could try to master that aspect. It was really helpful. We went down to a dive site called Home Reef and did a number of exercises to perfect buoyancy control. I didn’t bring my camera down on the first dive as I didn’t want to have anything extra to think about. This was my first dive in two and half years, so I wanted to make sure I remembered all the important stuff before bringing a camera into the mix.

The first dive went really well. We got to a max depth of 22m for 48 minutes. We saw a pretty awesome Moray eel, and a lot of small fish, but nothing else spectacular. It was just great to get down in the water again. We finished up, walked across the street, and took a 15 minute break to refill our tanks. We briefed for my next elective dive which was a wreck dive.

We took a short car ride down the street to the next dive site which was called Satil Wreck. It was a ship that was stolen from the French back in the 1960’s and then purposefully sunk in 1994 to become a dive site. It was amazing! There were thousands of fish all over the wreck, and we could actually go inside the ship and swim around. I brought my GoPro camera for the dive and had it strapped to my head for the dive. Unfortunately, the video seems to be a bit choppy, but I’ll try again tomorrow and hope for better results. We saw tons of fish down there like Lion Fish, a crocodile fish, glass fish, a barracuda, and clown fish. It was a phenomenal dive. We were actually able to go down and into the dive and actually swim through a couple parts of it. It was the coolest dive I’ve done so far in my short career. I can’t wait to get back out there tomorrow!

We finished up this dive after 43 minutes and reaching a depth of 21 meters. Tomorrow we are going to start with my deep dive to 30 meters, which is at another wreck. I can’t wait! Yaniv also took some pictures of me under water on the second dive today, so hopefully he will email me the pictures tomorrow so I can post some of them on this blog. I still need to figure out what’s going on with my video, so there will be no video posted today, but it’ll be coming soon.

I spent the rest of the day hanging out with Jordan (Canadian), Paul (English), Michael and Stefan (German) from the hostel. We had a good dinner next door at a Brazilian place called Casa Do Brazil, and then grabbed a few beers to drink back at the hostel. Eilat is a very chill town, so we’re trying to relax as much as possible. It’s hard work, but someone has to do it!

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