I'm back! 
I know when I left I promised to update this more but after early mornings and long days it's hard to keep up.
I've spent the last  couple days diving, well obviously :P

Tulamben
We spent 2 days in Tulamben staying overnight in "Paradise" on the water. This is the view from the restaurant. Looking out across the water  from the resort you can look up and down the beach. This town is really popular for divers as there are many dive sites in the area. Most famously the USAT Liberty wreck. We did 6 dives during the 2 days we were there. We dove at the Drop-Off where I got to lead the dive. We also dove at Coral Gardens another popular site.

This is the coral gardens! I didn't take many of these photos but one of the instructors whose supervising my internship did. Yoshi has a much nicer camera than I do so I'm using some of this photos because they are so much better

 Here's so of the aquatic life we saw! I'd never seen a cuttlefish diving before I came here but they are quite abundant on the reefs here. The way they disguise themselves in is quite impressive and can make them quite difficult to spot. Its hard to capture it on film but when you get closer their colours shift and change and there are coloured bands that run from their head to their tails. Clownfish are also very abundant on the reefs, sometimes you can find really cute tiny ones hiding in their anemone homes. there was one day we got attacked by one who was quite aggressively pursuing us when we got too close.

Next we had a night dive in on the Liberty Wreck. It was my firs night dive in a couple years, I also got to use my new torch. I had the spare attached to my shoulder and it turned itself on and was blinding the divers above me, before I realized it was on. We saw a huge moray eel on the wreck unfortunately he attracted a lot of attention and was soon berated with a lot of light from dive torches. The wreck was very busy at night, I'm sure because of the nocturnal animals that come out. We saw a couple of carrowy shells, which I had never seen before. We also saw some sleepy Bumphead Parrotfish, they were timid of the light though. After we can up there was an amazing view of the stars. It was amazing, none of us wanted to get out of the water because it was so relaxing and the view was so amazing. 

We had an early morning dive the next day, we all met at 5 am to set up our gear and we were in the water by 6:10. It was a 

Hello again all!
I've spent the las couple of days exploring the local dive sites and getting to know some of the other interns. Sunday night is our weekly BBQ we ordered pizza and spent the evening hanging around the pool. I had my first taste of aarak a locally made alcohol from either palm, coconut or rice. In this case it was palm, it was pretty good and reminded me of the sweet tequilas you can get when you tour the distilleries in Mexico. I also had my first taste of Bintang a local beer that is found cheap and in abundance, it was surprisingly tasty even though I'm not a beer drinker.

After a day off spent mostly catching up on sleep that  my severely jet lagged brain needed I had a couple of days of fun dives to just enjoy and get familiar with some of the local and popular dive sites.

Another Divemaster intern has arrived name Ella, she hasn't started the internship yet because she still has to finish her rescue but I'll be helping her with that this week! Along with another certified Divemaster who was very familiar with he site we explored Padang Bai a very popular dive launching town and resort area for tourist especially new divers.

We did three dives, one at the moth of the harbour and 2 in blue lagoon, one running all the way south along the coast and the other only going only a short way down the coast. the first dive was pretty interesting, probably one of the greatest highlight was a very aggressive clownfish protecting its anemone. It started by attacking Simon  going for his mask it continued to pursue him even after he'd moved off. Next it start in on me going for my mask and after I teased it a little I moved on but it still continued to attack my fins well after I was about 5 feet from its anemone. The most surprising part was that the clownfish ventured so far and attacked the two of us even though we are much, much large than him. He was only about 10 centimeters long, but some of his fellow 'house-mates' were a centimeter or less, which really just made them so much cuter.

Unfortunately I didn't get many good pictures for the dives, the picture above is definitely the best one. There was a couple of these statues scattered in the blue lagoon site. In many dive sites there are structures that serve as artificial reefs or are structures that corals and other organisms can attach to and begin a reef. Some times they purposely sink boats or planes or other structures to serve as an interesting area to dive in. Such as this wreck which was sunk intentionally.

The Next day we drove to Tulamben which is the site of a very popular wreck called the Liberty Wreck.

Rescue course!

Hello all of you who are following this blog! So I touched down in Bali two days ago I had one day of rest and recovery from some crazy jetlag. I spent my morning lost in the maze that is the streets of Sanur a community to the east of Denpasar which is the main city. The roads are all very narrow and run in seemingly random directions, mostly unmarked and even ending in dead ends or turning into dirt roads. So I have just moved into my new residence at the Sanur Bagoes Guest House a couple of hours ago! The man who runs it is very friendly all smiley and willing to help in any way, it was very welcome after a long day. 

I started my day here in the courtyard of blue season Bali. 

I spent my morning in the pool learning rescue skills from both Sandra the internship leader and steph an intern. Both were incredibly friendly and patient as I learned the intricacies of the techniques they were teaching me. After a successful morning in the pool where I clocked an (apparently) impressive time of 24 seconds during a run through of rescuing a non responsive diver at the surface. After a delicious lunch of veggies rice and peanut sauce. They were very accommodating towards my somewhat picky preferences( as some of you well know ;) )

Lunch was delicious after wards we packed upall of our gear to hit the local beach to run through the exercises again in open water. When we arrived we barely had to do any lifting ourselves there are guys who spend the whole day at the beach helping dive boats load up all their gear. The beach is a very popular dive area and is absolutely crowded (unfortunately) there were boats pulled up on shore as well as tied to buoys probably a km from shore. The area seemed quite crowded. 

We made our way the dive site called Dog's Point, the reason for the name seems have to been lost with time but the name has stuck. There was a a slight current running through the channel in the reef this is where we anchored and began to practice my newly learned skills.  The current made it difficult for me to do some of the excercise do to my lack of physical fitness :/. But after a couple of tries I seemed to have gotten the hang of it. Most of the excercises happen on the surface but a couple happen below the market green water. As we descended it became clear that the visibility was rather poor ranging from 3m to 5m, largely due to algae booms giving the water the murky, green quality. We did a couple of excercises under the surface including navigation and rescue techniques for both tired and panicked divers. It is fairly nerve wracking practicing the skills that may one day save someones life. I hope that the situation never arises and if it does that I'm prepared, although I truly hope it doesn't.

After we had finished up the skills section in the water we had time to take a little recreational dive around the local reef. Even with poor visibility and a smal reef we still saw many wonderful things. Tiny clown fish rubbing themselves among anemones. A moray eel peeking it's head out of a crevice in the rocks, he was very little only about 30cm long and very peaceful looking. We also saw another fish I don't know the name of it yet but it looks very similar to nemo. But instead of stripes he had spots of varying sizes and large beautiful fins that fluttered with every movement. The fishes pattern were made all the more interesting by the way he moved.  It almost looked as though he was doing a little dance and shaking his butt. It's was very beautiful to behold I wish I had had a camera with me but hopefully the next time I'll be able to capture it on film to share with all you lovely people.

When we surfaced it began to rain quite heavily the sky dumped buckets on us and the wind picked up but we still had to practice throwing a floatations device as well as assisting a panicked diver from the boat. After we were all soaked to the bone and freezing we made are way back to the dive centre to log our dive and clean our gear. 

I had a lovely first day meeting my new instructors and getting introducede to the first of many dive sites. One more day of rescue then I will start my dive master internship! Hopefully I will have more pictures to put up tomorrow evening. 

Thanks for following!

After months of preparation and research. The journey to become  scuba diver master has finally begun! I left Calgary early this morning after a couple of lovely days spent with friends and family at home.

It's quite difficult to spend so much time away from my friends and family especially after spending the year away from home at school. In some ways it made it a little easier because I've been living away from Calgary for 8 months now, I've gotten used to living somewhere else. This amazing journey I'm avout to embark on wouldn't be possible without the help of my amazing parents.

 I have couple hours to kill in Vancouver (where I currently am), unfortunately the kiosks to check in weren't working. This meant I had to hold  on to my large heavy bags so as I wasn't able to travel into the city for some free time. After a very long check-in process I was finally able to drop my bags off, it didn't give me quite enough time to venture away from the airport. But a delicious veggie burger made it all alright.