Leading my first dive – my personal experience
Leading a dive is one of the most exciting things to do in diving. The thrill it brings you when you enter the water and realise that all the responsibility is on you. Everyone is waiting for you to make a move. You are now in charge of what happens next.
It is also slightly stressful at the start because you suddenly remember that all the stress and pressure is on you as well. You are the person who controls how enjoyable the dive is for the customer and how much they get out of it.
I lead my first dive on the 19th of January 2022. I was leading a customer who had 100+ dives but hadn’t been diving in a while and he wanted to explore some of the amazing dive sites that we have in our local area. He arrived at the dive centre at 9.00AM and we instantly began talking about our past experiences in diving and what he wants to get out of diving as well.
I managed to gain a good idea of how confident he was and also what he was slightly nervous about as well.
Once we arrived at the pier we went to our speedboat Nemo 2 from which we would be diving. I showed him where his kit was and gave him a step by step refresher on how to set up his kit and what each piece of equipment did. I then went on to give him a briefing on the dive sites we would be going to and what to look out for such as the eels, rays and scorpion fish.
When we were ready we pulled off from the pier. The boat journey was about 20 minutes so we sat back and watched the beauty of Thailand fly by us as we sped out to our dive site, Boonsung Wreck.
Fish soup
Once we arrived at the dive site we kitted up and performed our pre-dive buddy checks. We then proceeded to put on our fins and walk over to the entry platform at the back.of the boat and both jumped in. We signalled that we were ok and descended.
As we slowly descended we looked around and there was just an array of fish, all shapes and sizes swimming around us. You would catch the glisten of their silver bellies in the sun as the played around right next to us. Once at the bottom we both had to stop and just watch in awe as the number of fish that swam around us was nothing like i had ever seen before.
It was best described at “fish soup” according to my customer. There were hundreds of fish, all different types, ranging from snapper, to barracuda to parrot fish. It took us a while to get over how magical it was.
We then proceeded to swim around the wreck and look in all the crevices and cracks finding a plethora of different marine animals such as nudibranches and lobster. We saw eels slither slowly around the rusted frame of the boat. The fish just seemed to double every time we looked somewhere else.
Ascending again
Once he reached 70 Bar we began our ascent to the safety stop. At the safety stop we looked up and the shoals.of fish were playing in our bubbles from our regulator which was like something out of a dream. Swimming centimetres away from.your mask. So close you could have touched them.
After the safety stop we ascended in amazement at how beautiful that dive had just been.
Scuba Diving with G2S
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