With the US government not doing much to allow us to fly, Ana and I decided late Thursday night not to cancel our original weekend plans of finishing our SCUBA course from last month. I’d also managed to convince her that we’d be so busy, it was a good opportunity for her to get used to sleeping in a tent.
We arrived at about 1am and pitched the tent on the beach to the East of the Herod’s hotel. It wasn’t supposed to be a reminder of the last trip, but it’s simply that this is a relatively quiet beach compared to the “usual” spots further South.
Friday morning after arriving at Meduza, we ran into the assistant instructor from our previous course. He was now no longer an apprentice, and was teaching one of the two 2nd star courses this weekend. Since he knew us, he quickly pulled us into his group in exchange for two others who he “ditched”. 
The first dive was supposed to be to practice identifying fishes. He covered a few signs before going down, one of them being for sea turtles. We never expected to run into one, of course. Surprise!! At about 12 m depth, I was swimming closest to the instructor when he turned and made the sign for a sea turtle. I thought he was testing us, but as I came around a rock sure enough, I saw a full-sized (I think) sea turtle swimming. We swam nearby, taking pictures for the better part of 10 minutes. At one point he swam almost right at me and turned just a few meters short. I am soooo happy I brought my new underwater camera. What a sight for the first few pictures to be taken with it.
The rest of the weekend was rather uneventful. The people in our group were nice, but some really needed to work on their buoyancy control as they were up and down a lot. For the final dive of the course, we had to plan our own dive. While it was recommended to us that each of the 3 pairs in our group take turns leading, by unanymous request of the 4 others, Ana and I led the entire dive. It was quite an interesting experience to have to manage a group of other new divers. As a direct result of this experience, I immediately went and bought a wrist slate. Mis-communication just really created too many problems.
I’m now up to 14 dives, and just need 6 more under I can dive unaccompanied by an instructor.
The underwater photos are all 35mm film, so it will be a few days until I can develop & scan them.
[tags]diving,scuba,IANTD,eilat,israel[/tags]
