PADI Open Water Diver Course

It's been on my mind for quite awhile now and I've recently decided to take the plunge to get my PADI Open Water Diver, Scuba-diving license!

Just in case you were wondering:
PADI - Professional Association of Diving Instructors

I've decided to do this with Gill Divers as they seemed to be a reliable and safe 5-star PADI Dive Centre.

Gill Divers Banner

Headed down to the dive centre to make fill in forms (so many indemnity/not my tai ji if something happen to you/health clauses - of course haha) and make payment. Staff there then were pretty young and energetic. They seem to be part-timers though (those at the counter).

Got mailed a digital version of the PADI Open Water Diver Manual (Wtf, it's 242 pgs long - thought that it will be simple as the whole course is so commercialised), Recreational Dive Planner tables and Knowledge Reviews that I apparently need to prepare for my upcoming theory lessons/test.

Theory

Went through the PADI manual on my own initially. Apparently there are so many risks that you run (some potentially fatal even) if you don’t do everything properly, especially with regards to managing pressures (the Pascal one) all around your body. I've also realised that diving is quite a technical activity to do.

The class preparation itself on-site at the Gill-Divers centre lasted over 2 days. It involved video-viewing and subsequent question reviews.

After all the reviews had been covered, we took a test and you had to pass it to proceed (all MCQ).

Met many people of many different ages from all walks of life as well, so it was a pretty diverse environment in the 'classroom' area.


Pool Practical

The pool practical was conducted at Outram Secondary School (Quite amazing that a sec. school has their own swimming pool).

Anyway, we were split into groups and each group was allocated to 1 instructor. I got the same instructor that taught me theory which was pretty interesting. Each of us were then assigned to 1 dedicated buddy for the day, as diving has to be done in pairs.

The whole point of the pool practical was to conduct all the skills required for the open water dive in a controlled environment, before you actually went on the actual dive out in the sea (for safety reasons of course).

They taught you everything from gearing up, to doing checks and eventually all the skills required and expected of you underwater in your scuba gear.

I must say that the first few breathes I took underwater was simply an unforgettable experience! There's like this 'exhalish steam punk-ish kind of sound' - (best description I can think of) every time you took breathes.

Had some troubles with the mask removal and clearing underwater initially as when my mask was off, I sorta 'panic-ed' a little, which caused me to breathe through my nose and took in a lot of water. Choked on it and gotta surface, quite pai seh. I managed to get it sorted out at the end though, thankfully.

I've also realised the importance of keeping calm and staying in control throughout the whole dive, regardless of what happens. Otherwise, it becomes very easy to screw up and it can be quite serious.

Other than that, I was pretty confident of the other skills required of me. Thinking about it, you better be, as the reality is that there's some kind of risk involved in something like that.

Overall, the feeling of being underwater and swimming around is so quiet and peaceful. (I know it's only a swimming pool, but still.) Any communication done is done through hand signals, which is a pretty new and interesting way of communicating.

Looking forward to the actual dive trip to Bintan.


Dive Trip - Bintan

Day 1

Arrived at Tanah Merah ferry terminal about 30mins earlier prior to the meeting time. Bought some breakfast ($3+ Egg Mayo Sandwhich...) at a nearby coffee store and chilled in the vicinity for awhile before gathering with the diving staff.

Departure Hall

Boarded the ferry after and the boat took around 45minutes to reach Bintan. The ferry kinda resembled the one you took to Tekong during army lol.

Bintan - Welcome Sign

Arrived at Bintan and we met up with all our group mates, diving instructors and dive masters. Took the bus which was another 1 hour journey to Bintan Agro Beach Resort, which was our accommodation for the next 2 days.

Went ahead to have our lunch which was a little miserable, it was just a small bowl's worth of rice and 1 egg with another miserable cucumber slice and tomato. Was not filling at all and we had to go diving on semi-empty stomaches lol.

The crew proceeded to load up all the scuba gears onto a total of 2 boats. The people were then split into a total of 4 groups: Groups 1,2,3 & the leisure group; 2 groups to 1 boat.

The first boat housed group 1 & 2, while the 2nd held group 3 and the leisure group. I was in group 3 and was paired up with the same buddy I had during the pool practical!

Our Dive Boats

After changing and doing all of our necessary prep work, we boarded the boat and headed out to sea!

The whole build-up was pretty thrilling as there was a whole stack of oxygen tanks, BCDS, fins, masks, weight belts, etc(other gears) stacked all around the ship and it gave you the feeling that you were going to do something bad-ass haha.

It was also going to be my first time willingly jumping into the middle of the sea. Only remembered 1 other occasion when it happened non-intentionally and that was when I fell off a banana boat when I was quite young (remembered my mom freaking out then).

Our Dive Instructor (DI), Jia Jun & Dive Master (DM), Scott introduced themselves to us. Our DI was a funny guy and our DM was a cool, chilled and skilled dude. The role of the DI was to literally be the one conducting the course, whereas the DM was the person who would follow us to facilitate the group (safety, etc) and to assist the DI whenever necessary.

Both of them were from China apparently - you could tell when they started talking. They spoke to us directly in mandarin. When I requested if they could give the instructions in english as it was pretty new to hear all the diving terms in chinese, it was quite fail. Told them that it was alright to do chinese all the way in the end.

My dive group apparently had 4 mainland chinese people (3girls, 1 guy), 1 Malaysian (My buddy) and me, making a total of 6 people, excluding the diving staff.

After the briefing from our DI, we geared up and proceeded on to work on our skills in our 1st and 2nd dives.

1st Dive

In the 1st dive, we exited the boat via the 'Back-roll entry' method. When I hit the water, I quickly broke the surface and signalled to the DI that I was ok. It was then I realised that I was actually in the fucking sea - it was truly an adrenaline pumping moment!

Instructions were to swim to a white colour float and wait for the whole group to gather before we proceeded on to submerge to do our skills underwater.

Visibility was pretty poor (1-3m) and we all had to stick super close to each other, otherwise if someone gets lost, gg.

Had to equalize a lot more often as well, as this time you were really breaking a lot deeper depths as compared to the pathetic pool depth during the pool practical session.

Proceeded on to do skills such as regulator clearing, mask removal & replacement, alternate air-source sharing, hovering & maintaining neutral bouyancy.

All forms of communications underwater was done through hand signals.

I was slightly worried for the mask clearing and removal as I had some problems with it during the pool session, as once your mask goes off, sometimes it's just instinctive for some reason that you take a slight breath through your nose which really fucks me up and made me surface during the pool session before (I've already sorted it out though). However this time, you just can't afford to fuck up. Your deep underwater and you can't surface too easily. Thankfully, I managed to clear it rather smoothly.

I was the first one that was told to surface after clearing all the skills in the 1st dive as I had the lowest oxygen left lol (50 bar), apparently I was taking larger breathes or something. Maybe it was due to my adrenaline making me breathe faster? I didn't exactly notice myself taking rapid breathes though, in fact I was breathing pretty normally imo. Oh well...

After surfacing from the first dive, inflated my BCD and back-paddled back to the boat where me and the group replaced our oxygen tanks, in preparation for the 2nd dive.


2nd Dive

After replacing our oxygen tanks, we chilled on the boat for around 1 hour to rid ourselves of the accumulated nitrogen  in our bodies so that we can safely make the 2nd dive.

In the 2nd dive, we covered skills such as CESA (Controlled Emergency Swimming Ascent), Cramp Removal Exercises, Equipment R&R & Tired-Diver towing. Things went pretty smoothly here.

After we've finished our skills for the 2nd dive, we packed our gear neatly and kept them on the boat before heading back to have a nice (more like o-k actually), zhi cha dinner.

Hanged around with some of the people from my group and others as well, chit chatting and walking around the resort. It was a really nice feeling to experience a change of pace once in a while.

Turned in for the night pretty early as we had to get up early the next morning for our 3rd and 4th dives.

Oh yeah, managed to get a group photo on the boat as well:

PADI OW Diver - Group 3 (Boat Photo)

Day 2

Woke up at about 6+ am on day 2. Washed up and had an international breakfast buffet at 7am. I tremendously regret eating too much here (oily food to boot) - I'll get to why later.

Before we departed for our 3rd & 4th dives, we had some time to kill. I ended up talking quite a lot with my room-mates. 1 of them was actually a guy from England who is in Singapore for work and is clocking dives towards his Dive Master course. (He is already a 'Rescue Diver' and is part of the leisure group). The other guy, was the china guy from my group. Though he was quite soft spoken at first, he's actually pretty cool. Apparently, he came to Sg alone for holiday and this was just something he just decided to do lol.

When the time was up, we headed onto the same boats and headed out again for our 3rd and 4th dives.


Dive 3

The main focus of this dive was underwater navigation, we had to be able to swim away from the group, make a 180° turn and return back to the group. Doesn't sound too hard right? Oh no lol, the visibility was as shit as yesterday (1-3m). This simply made it hard to even spot your group after you've swam away and you just gotta pray that you didn't make any kind of parallax error on your compass watch on the way back.

This was also the dive where we descended to the deepest depth (for us, the students at least), here I could really see the effects of the pressure difference on my oxygen consumption (a lot higher). The mask and ear squeezes were more prominent as well.

The navigation exercise was done around the depth of 10-18m.

Remember me mentioning something about me regretting eating too much crap for breakfast? Yeah, here's what happened after we surfaced from dive 3:

I got on the boat, un-geared up and sat down. At this point, I started feeling seasick as fuck as the boat was now rocking a lot due to the big currents. I just thought that I'd put up with it till the end, oh I was wrong. The whole bunch of shit I ate in the morning decided to come-up suddenly (with very little warning) out of my mouth and onto the boat just like the nice damn Singapore Merlion! My whole group was shocked, especially my buddy lol. I feel so sad and guilty. :( If I was gonna merlion, I should have just done it overboard into the sea. I cleaned myself and the gears up by jumping back into the sea/ pouring water all over the boat and apologised to everyone.

Everyone was like 'it's ok, it's ok' and were really nice, but I seriously felt like a small pussy ass fucktard. It was sad then :(

Lesson learned really, eat a light and healthy breakfast next time. 


Dive 4

Apparently, after all that shenanigans we have completed all the skills required of us during the OW dive.

Dive 4 ended up being a leisure dive.

I handed my camera over to our DI, after which he and the DM brought us around, trying to show us some good sights even in the crappy visibility we had then.

The camera is an Olympus TG-860, it's pretty affordable (~300-400SGD) for an underwater camera (up to 15m). I've considered getting camera housing for a DSLR / Waterproof phone bag initially but it was too expensive / risky.

Our DM helped to take a shot on the surface:

PADI OW - Group 3 (Surface Shot) - HUAT AH!

As I did not had my mind focused on doing skills now, I managed to see corals, fishes and sea urchins. My DI also managed to take a picture of a nudibranch (think sea-snail, without the shell).

Nudibranch

He also took shots of the group in dive gear underwater. (It was my request actually and he was very happy to do so - what a damn nice guy)

SCUBA Gear Underwater

The last leisure dive was the most fun as the focus was not on doing skills, but rather - sight seeing. Although visibility was pretty bad then, I still managed to see some rather good sights after going near enough.

Surfaced after and prepared to head back to the resort where we had to pack our things and get ready to head home in the evening.

Reached back at Tenah Merah ferry terminal at approximately 10pm SG time and shared a cab home with some1 from group 1 (very nice guy btw). Home sweet home at around 11pm. :)

All in all, I had a fun time, it was also my very first time travelling out of Singapore alone. (yea yea, I know it's just to Bintan)

Made a lot of new friends and have finally become a PADI Open Water Diver! :D

Would like to thank all my group mates in group 3 and everyone that has interacted with me then for being such amazing company!