Eilat, Israel, Asia

Today was my last full day in Eilat, last day in Israel, and last day diving. I’m not happy to be leaving so soon, but I had an incredible day! I woke up this morning still dealing with a cold that’s been bothering me for about a week now. Because of this I wasn’t able to equalise my right ear since last night. This made me really nervous because my first dive for today was a deep dive to 30m (100ft) and the pressure down there is far stronger than anything I’ve dealt with before. I wasn’t sure what would happen with my certification if I couldn’t equalise on the way down and had to give up.

Yaniv picked me up at 8:45am and said that we would just play it by ear. Obviously we wouldn’t do anything that would possibly hurt me, so we would just have to see what happened. We started our decent to the Yakush Wreck and because we took it really slowly, I was able to equalise and make it all the way down. It was a HUGE relief! I was so happy to look at my dive computer and see I had made it down to 30m. This was the deepest dive of the day so I knew the other two should be fine.

We saw the wreck which was much smaller than the Satil wreck from yesterday, but it was still pretty cool. We also saw a massive Moray eel while we were down there. On our way back up, at about 20m, Yaniv waved at me to show me something. He pointed at the sea bed straight ahead of us and there was my GoPro camera, just sitting on the sand. It had been on my head to start the dive, but obviously with me moving my mask to try and equalise on the way down, it fell right off and I didn’t even notice. Unbelievable! So I imagine that for about 15 minutes while we were down at 30m, my camera is just going to be looking at the sand. I’m so happy he found it though! That’s the last time I’ll use the head mount. After that incident I’ve only used the handle that I can tether to my wrist. We came up after doing 33 minutes in the water, and I felt great!

We took a short break to refill the air tanks, and then went through a briefing for my fish identification dive. This was the best dive in my opinion because there was really no new skill that I needed to think about. All we were doing was going down to about 20m and identifying as many different fish as possible. It was brilliant. The one thing I was dying to see was an octopus, and Yaniv came through! The first one we saw was sitting in/under a rock, so all we could see was his eyes. But the second one we saw was amazing! It was moving along the sea bed while changing colors and its shape. At one point it stood itself up and made spikes come out of its head. It obviously felt that we were getting a bit too close. We saw loads of fish and coral and just had a really fun dive.

We took a lunch break after the second dive and I went across the street to a place called Bar Beach. It’s pretty self-explanatory. It was a great place to just chill on a deck, eat some food, and look at all the water sports going on on the Red Sea. I enjoyed my time there and then headed back to do my last mandatory dive for my certification. It was a bit dull compared to the fish identification dive, but it was something that had to be done, and we only ended up going down to about 6m. It was called the Navigation dive and I just had to demonstrate under water that I could go to a point using a compass and then find my way back as well. I also had to travel in an imaginary square to make sure that I could get back to the same point I had started at, and that was easy enough. We spent the rest of the 28 minutes looking around for more fish and managed to find another octopus just before we got out of the water. They really are amazing creatures!

I was absolutely buzzing after that day of diving. Since I wasn’t even sure that I was going to be able to make one dive today, the fact that I was able to do all three and complete my course was awesome. I finished up my paperwork with Yaniv and got my temporary PADI Advanced Open Water Diver certificate. This means that for all my future dives (especially when I get to the Galapagos Islands) I won’t be restricted to 18m.

I came back to the hostel, grabbed dinner with Jordan from my hostel, and we’re going to head out to see Noah at the cinema tonight. It seems like a decent way to chill after all that excitement today! Unfortunately my GoPro videos still appear to be really choppy and I don’t know why. I’m going to try to work that out and then post some pictures and videos later. I don’t know what’s going on, but I WILL figure it out!

And then tomorrow I’m off to Jordan. The fun doesn’t stop!!