We wound up leaving Arad much later than we’d planned, and only arrived in Eilat Saturday night at 01:00. We managed to find the beach where the dive club is located, but it’s a short stub of a beach, and so there was no room for a tent. Rather than heading down to Coral Beach about 2km towards the Egyptian border, our exhaustion caused us to take the decision to just make use of these rather nice-looking wood-framed *beds* on the dive club’s beach. They had a regular sized mattress and it was a double bed. With the heat, sleeping bags were not needed. I spread my tents groundsheet on top of the mattress and we went to try to sleep. HOT (cable company) is sponsoring some beach event about 200m from where we were trying to sleep, and the techs were running sound checks until almost 03:00. Ouch. We did finally sleep, waking up at about 07:00 to go off to find breakfast.
We got started with the dive course. Yesterday was very intense. When the introduction was concluded, our course was split so each instructor had no more than 6 people. Ana and I were in a group with two other couples, one young and the other in their 40s. When it came time to introductory exercises underwater, the older couple unfortunately took a long time. It turned what should have been 30 minutes underwater into about 1.5hrs, so we only finished at close to 19:00. What bothers me more than the time, when one of them panicked, they grabbed Ana - hard. This worries me a lot for when we get into open water, so we expressed our concerns to the intructor this morning.
Today was a much smoother pace. We spent the morning in an air-conditioned classroom (Did I mention it is 45 degrees C here in Eilat?), and then the afternoon underwater working on more exercises. We concluded with our first real swim where we reached neutral boyancy. Things are looking better for tomorrow. Oh, and today the older couple still took some time but other than not really giving us space to swim were much less panicky.
Off to the shower and then a pub called the Three Monkeys that many have recommended.
[tags]israel,diving,scuba,eilat[/tags]
