As we were about to leave Rabaul (in Papua New Guinea), we saw an advertisement for a diving certification and started talking about it and I decided to do it. (Really, Pippa convinced me to do it! She doesn’t like fish, nor sharks, nor being unable to not see the bottom the sea, so diving is on hold for now but maybe she’ll be convinced later.)

We looked up our next destination, the town of Ghizo on the island of Gizo, and it has a dive shop! So now that we arrived, I’ve taken up the PADI Open Water Diver certification, and it’s been a lot of fun.

We’ll make a regular blog post for the Solomon Islands (which Gizo is part of), but here’s an unplanned post about diving.

NOTE: This blog post is a bit late because we had very limited internet access.
NOTE: All the photos in this post are by Salvador, an employee of Dive Gizo who came to some of the dives with his camera.

Training at Dive Gizo

There’s only one dive shop in the whole of Gizo: Dive Gizo. They offer diving certifications and outings, island trips, etc.

I contacted them via email before coming over, and so, as I set foot on Gizo, I was handed a thick book of diving theory and told to start studying. My diving lesson were to start the next day.

At the shop I met my instructor and we went through the equipment (what’s it all called, what does it all do, how to check it’s all working, how to use it all, etc.) as well as a briefing for the day (where we’d go and what we’d do there). Gizo doesn’t have a pool so the first dive was in sandy shallows on a island off of Gizo. I learned basic skills: clearing my mask, recovering my air-intake in case I ever let it go, etc. Straight afterwards, we went for a short dive.

I had to go through the whole of the theory book and complete “knowledge reviews”. I haven’t had homework in a while! The book, a standard publication by PADI, is a third safety (dos and donts), a third knowledge (pressure-density-volume of air at different depths, pressure equalisation, decompression limits, etc.), and a third information about other PADI courses.

I did multiple other dives. Mostly training and looking at the fish hiding in the coral, but also a well preserved plane wreck.

And in the end, I got my certification!

Under the sea

I enjoyed diving a lot. There’s the strangeness of it all: the sounds, the light, the movements… everything is different from the surface.

And there’s a lot of new things to see: aquatic plants that look like trees, fish of many colours and shapes, etc. We even saw two different shark and a manta ray.

I particularly enjoyed the learning: how to control your buoyancy in the water and how your breathing affects your buoyancy. It’s a skill that takes practice, which I’m looking forward to getting.