While Emily was off on her open water and advanced courses, I decided to do my 2 day rescue divers course; conscious that in New Zealand we often dive without many of the safe guards as we should. Another girl, was also doing the course as part of her preparation for Diver master training, so I had a partner in crime. Luckily we only had an hour of a video watching, called ‘stress and rescue’ which was utterly mind numbing – nothing like a lecture explaining what constitutes stress. The rest of the first morning was spent discussing ‘stress’, adapting to situations and going over the scenarios we would have to run that afternoon while out diving. Kitted up, we headed out for an afternoon of training, which focused around settling panicked divers, learning new hand signals underwater and learning to swim and adapt to diving without a mask. It was a pretty tough afternoon physically as we were constantly descending and ascending (hard on the ears) and pulling unconscious people through the water. We also learnt how to get an unconscious diver out if their gear and up a ladder – nothing like carrying 60kg of dead weight out of the water up a boat that is pitching and rolling around. Our instructor was pretty good – although he had a short attention span as was constantly play fighting with other instructors and making sexist jokes.
The next day was again spent doing some classroom work around search patterns, quickly followed up by a multiple choice test; my favourite thing on a holiday.
That afternoon we did more rescuing of various dive master trainees that had been roped into helping out. After 3 hours of constantly taking off gear, resetting equipment and quickly jumping back in and trying not to be drowned by a panicked diver – I was absolutely buggered. The 200m swim dragging an unconscious diver in heavy choppy water whilst doing rescue breaths was the last big hurdle.
The course was great though in that it taught dive safety in detail – the last time I practised was when I first qualified to dive in 1999. This has made me feel a heap more confident about diving in New Zealand.

While at Big Blue I took the opportunity to discover free diving and complete my SSI level 1 course. Started a few months prior, the freediving centre was run by two professionals. What struck me was they were so genuinely enthusiastic individuals and teachers, very keen to encourage and to mentor. Approaching freediving from the perspective of a long-term scuba diver, I was incredibly ignorant of the sport, buying the line from the scuba instructors that it was all ‘zen’ and meditation’ and a very fringe, almost hippy thing. Instead I discovered a creative pursuit, where one required a lot more skill, training, and self-awareness than scuba diving, which now seemed to be relegated to more of a physical technical hoppy, rather than a sport.
Pepe and Flavia went through the physiology of free diving, explaining the mechanisms behind the ‘feelings’ of wanting to come up for air, equalisation and reflexes which allow us to hold our breath for longer and five deeper. We also learnt about the equipment and different disciplines of diving.
The first afternoon was spent in the pool, a patient few hours spent trying to coak the Scuba out of me in the way I kicked and moved underwater. We also did some relaxation breathing, where I managed to hold my breath past the 4 min mark; a vast improvement having now learnt breathing techniques and got an understanding of what different feels meaning.
The next morning was our diving time, a chance to practice all we had learnt. Big blue freediving has their own boat, meaning we could make trips to remote calmer areas and dedicated space, rather than relying on a few places in a scuba boat. It was difficult after so many days of diving to equalise head first rapidly( as opposed to the gradual ‘take your time’ approach in scuba). However I managed 14m free diving without having to change my ‘head-down’ body position. my instructor and I chilled out for a bit at 14m next to the end of our special bouy line, before ascending. I was frustrated that my ears packed up during then second session, but I overall really enjoyed myself.
For someone who has done a lot of scuba diving, the sensation of being down deep and relying solely on a breath with the freedom to go where you want is fantastic. There is a beauty in being self reliant whilst having the option to challenge yourself and explore new limits.
Peep and Flavia are a fantastic team, teaching a great sport.

I’m defiantly looking for clubs to join in New Zealand

Emily and I headed out for a few fun dives, and a chance to relax and see some marine life (and not do skills stations on every dive!). We headed out the first blustery morning to the Southwest Pinnacle. The seas were pretty massive, which meant the relatively isolated dive spot (45 min from the island) was completely ours – this was great compared to the many dive boats which crowd the ‘learning’ dive areas. It was great to do a deep dive to 29m with amazing visibility – Emily’s choice to do her advanced course (qualifying her to go to 30m i stead of 18m) was a great choice. We then headed off to Shark Island, where the massive current turned it into a drift dive, a new experience for Emily. It was also a good training ground to get use to my new dive computer we had purchased for my birthday/Christmas/another birthday …..!!!
The following day I headed out for some more dives, to see if I could see the whale shark that had been spotted the day before. Despite not seeing it, I had two great dives to cap off a great week.

During our dive week, we had a few dinner/nights out with Nicky (English girl we had meet on our floating market boat trip in Vietnam) and her partner . She was a videographer working for a dive company on the island and managed to get me a very cheap rate on my dive computer!

After 9 days on the island and plenty of diving later we headed back to Bangkok for adventures north.