Lost at Sea
By Gabi. Filed in Yap |
Dive day #2 did not go quite as smoothly as # 1.
We boarded our boat, had a wonderful drive through the mangroves out of the channel, and continued on to the Miil Channel. Strange, we thought we were going to the reef. That was what had been agreed upon the day before. No, we were again going to the mantas…….the obnoxious German group at the back of the boat had insisted upon it. The Yapese are too polite to argue with anyone, so they just relent. They always try to please, they don’t confront. Originally their ancestors had been from the Indonesian area, where this is an attribute of the people. We had already learned this phenomena in Thailand. So, off to the Channel we were. We weren’t pleased about the situation because we prefer to do different dives, but since we were living with locals, we were considered locals and were receiving reduced prices, so we couldn’t really complain much. We had a different guide today, who seemed to constantly be chewing betel nuts. This could have been what caused our problems.
With the most minuscule dive briefing, one can imagine, we backward rolled into the water again.
Our betel chewing guy was off in front of us and promptly after 2 minutes managed to lose us in the 15 ft. of visibility, that the water granted us today. We looked around, couldn’t find him, and decided it was time to do our own dive, since there had been no instructions on the surface of how they handle this situation. Lothar took out his compass and took matters in his own hands. He guided us through a nice reef dive in about 45 to 25ft of water and back to the boat. Since we really didn’t just want to sit around waiting for mantas, which was the proposed dive, it was actually good, that he lost us.
Near the end of the dive, we saw the rest of the group and just before surfacing, a beautiful manta glid by, waving good-bye with his enormous wings. We got the best of both worlds!
Back on the boat we got chewed out for “getting lost”. The nerve of this intoxicated “guide”!
Saturday, April 30th 2005 at 8:27 am |
what are betal nuts? they have intoxicating properties? and why´d they chew you out if they don´t like conflict? because you were considered locals?..which is strange anyway from the looks of you:grin:
Saturday, April 30th 2005 at 8:42 am |
nevermind – i read about them now in a different post:-) so have you tried them yet?
Saturday, April 30th 2005 at 4:03 pm |
You know those Germans can be pretty stubborn
And what did your PADI training teach you? If you get seperated from the group, search for no more than a minute and then surface.
Just kidding, I’ve lost the Divemaster a couple of times in Grenada, and I just continued the dive with my buddy until the max dive time was reached. I got a little bit of flak, but nothing too bad, since they seem to like me (or at least they call if I haven’t been diving in 2 weeks…)
Monday, May 2nd 2005 at 6:39 am |
do they really?? to see if you´re still alive or if you´ve found somewhere else to dive maybe? you said you get a discount there…are you their most-frequent diver or something?:wink: