win some, lose some: redux...

well what a stunning weekend that was! my first sea dives as a padi open water diver, seven of them in all, squeezed into three days and a morning. so much to see, so little time - definitely gotta work on calming down my breathing and staying under much longer. improved bottom time about 10 minutes over the three days tho.

made my first deep dive to 30m on the last morning before leaving for home. while that was great, even better was coming across a huuuge mother humpback whale who had recently given birth to a white/grey calf. its tail was still wrinkled as it passed quitely under the boat, being held up for breathing on its mother's massive back. the boat skipper thought it was dead when he first saw it due to its lack of movement. the mother then quietly shepherded the baby around, cutting it off every time it wanted to swim towards the boat. all so calm and graceful. what an awesome experience. it filled me with awe and a strange deep kinship for the ocean.

crowd-pleaser defcon sauces accounted for dinner on saturday night, all three flavours and one barbeque sweet sauce batch for one. gawd, the flash on the camera makes it all look so messy. but waaay delicious!

so thanks to colin, nix, eben, simon, s'pho, vusi and the rest at amoray diving for a really great long weekend.

and on the way back, outside of middelburg, the jeep packed up again. same problem...gearbox. rescued by chan's dad in a bakkie with all our kit (the jeep was crammed to the roof rack with 4 people and evryone's gear) not even one thousand trouble free k's after getting it replaced at the cost of about 25k. gotta love the quality of that work. :(

mre
x