Diving, diving, diving | Dahab is awesome
Gülsah and me can now call us "Advanced open water" diver :-) We´ve had five beautiful dives with our instructor Frank, inlcuding one night dive here at Lighthouse, where we trained our beyonce control, navigation and other essential diving skills. In addition we´ve done nine more dives, and two are still ahead of us. Step by step everything gets better - assembling the equipment, beyonce control and the comfort in general beneath the surface. As my air consumption is still a bit high (the right breathing isn´t that easy..) we had a day with Brian Crossland (www.blueoceanfreedivers.com) a well known freedive instructor, to learn more about breathing techniques and everything else related to air, lungs, heart etc. We started with some relaxation exercises as the more relaxed you are, the less pumps yur heart, the less air you Need, the longer your dive will be.. We then did some breath holding exercises in his pool, where Gülsah and me constantly improved (in the end i managed to hold my breath for 1:35 min :-)). After a lunch we then went for a dive to apply our newly gained knowledge and we both did well. Brian showed us the huge impact breathing can have on beyonce control and on the whole dive in general. We had a beautiful 62 min dive (around 15m deep) and Gülsah came out with 60 bar, I had 50 bar (she´s always been better than me ;-)) - we both think this course was great especially regarding the confidence underwater..
Regarding the situation here, I can just once again say there are no safety issues or whatsoever in Dahab. It´s really sad to see how bad the business is for all people here. It´s really a strange feelimg when we walk down the "strip" in the evening: every restaurant kind of begs us already to come in and eat, unfortunately in 99% of the time wehave to say "no, thanks". They already offer up to 50 % discount, that´s how desperate some of them are. But as all of them say here: Inshallah, it will get better soon...
The onebenefiting from the few tourists is definetly mother nature. The marine life has time to recover and Brian told us, that the diving has improved a lot since the revolution started two years ago. There´s just more fish and healthier coral reefs again and that´s eventually what every diver wants ;-)
As soon as I have some time I´ll give a detailed report about the Gopro 3, how I use it and what results I`m getting out of it.. So stay tuned :-D