This Monday me and my mum went diving at the top of the rock in Welligama Bay, Sri Lanka. It was my first open water dive so we hopped on a boat and drove out to the top of the rock.
We flopped over the side of the boat. I was really scared as the boat’s side was over a metre from the surface of the water and they wanted me to backwards roll from the bench (which was 20 cm bellow the side of the boat). I sat there on the wall of the boat, hand over my mask, reg and weight belt, held my breath and flopped over the side of the boat. Once in the water we descended the shot line into eight metre viz. When we reached the anchor we were surrounded by rocks of all shapes and sizes. On the way down we passed the top of the rock at five metres. I also remembered to clear my ears and check my buoyancy. The other three divers swam off to do a deeper dive (our group consisted of two dive masters, us, two more tourists and a boat man) but we swam off at twelve metres and in two minutes we had seen a large stone fish. This is one of the two poisonous fish species that live in this area the other being lion fish. After 31 more minutes of colourful fish and beautiful coral (sneaky jaunts down to 15.3 metres…this never happened =] ), the dive master sent up his SMB and we proceeded to a free water ascent with a three minute safety stop at five meters. We took off our kit in the water and climbed back into the boat. When on the boat, the other group said they saw a turtle right at the beginning of their dive.
It was my first open water dive and I loved every bit of it from flopping off the boat to getting back on.
Two days later I had my second dive and my first family dive. We saw jellyfish, a giant moray eel, sand poopers and hundreds more assorted fish. We did swim-throughs and swam upside down, floated, sank, hovered and played tic tac toe for 44 amazing minutes.
Loving the photos!!!!