The tourist thing and dive courses
A day off meant I got time to look around Khasab a bit. With Ankie (a friend of Sandra and also a guest at the moment) by my side I spend a day being a tourist.
First of all we visited the Mosque, unfortunately the people inside (cleaners) didn’t want to let us in even though we were there at the right time and were wearing the right clothing. A little talk with the Omani at the building next to the Mosque did get us in. It’s a pretty new Mosque which is, of course, very very well taken care of. Unfortunately they didn’t let me take pictures. It was a great experience to visit it though.
Ater the Mosque we visited Khasab Castle which is an old Portuegese fort. It was an ok thing to see, nothing too spectacular. The view from the tower was nice though, see the picture!
The diving of the last two days has been mostly about courses. We now have Ronnie and Matteo (his stepson) here who are doing courses, Ronnie does a Divemaster traineeship and Matteo is doing his Advanced Open Water course. Yesterday was all about Ronnie divemastering a boat of tourists, played by us and I must say we went pretty all out on him. We started playing the annoying guests on the boat with loads of questions and mistakes. Going into the water I ‘forgot’ to attach my BCD to my regulater which made me sink to the bottom right away, Sandra didn’t have enough weight with her and during the dive we were never close, always swimming the wrong way and touching stuff. When surfacing I got ‘unconcious’ and he had to rescue me while Kurt was in the way. It was very funny to see him struggling with everything but I felt a bit for him too at some points. In the end we all agreed he did a good job, probs to Ronnie!
Today I got into the water with Matteo to do the navigation part of his course. Attaching my bouy to a stone he had to swim back and forth, swim a square and return to the bouy after some swimming. Especially the last exercise can be quite tough. I was swimming over the reef with him for about 5 minutes and then I told him to swim back to the bouy. Even though I changed my route a few times to put him off he swam to the bouy like a straight arrow. Very good!
Tomorrow I will be doing the bouyancy part of the course and do some exercises to improve that. That’s going to be fun as well!
Unfortunately because of the guiding and teaching I am doing at the moment I am not briging my camera. I am sure I can make some pictures to show again soon.