Ooops, I nearly lost the website under the pile of dust that it had gathered! I´ve been so busy, and so much has happened and there`s a lot to write about, so best get a cuppa and come back!

So, first of all, I`m now officially a divemaster! I passed all of my exams (Physics, Physiology and First Aid, Equipment, Decompression Theory and the RDP, Dive Skills and the Environment, Supervising Activities for Certified Divers, Supervising Student Divers in Training, PADI Divemaster Conducted Programs), mapped a dive site ( the new dive site of Penetration Point, Southside, Utila), reached my minimum requirement of sixty dives and well beyond, spent many hours underwater supervising new divers, passed the water skills and stamina test ( 400 metre swim, 15 minute survival float, 800 metre snorkelling, 100 metre inert diver push/tow, rescue of a non-breathing diver at surface), proved that I can demonstrate the 21 essential diving skills and the dreaded snorkel test (the wordwide initiation of divemasters is to put a dive mask on their face, put a snorkel in their mouths and pour alcohol (in my case rum and coke) down the snorkel at regular 15 second interval, and having the mask filled with beer and then have to demonstrate how to clear it). The last test was definitely the hardest and least fun, though I passed it and recovered from it after a couple of days.

The scuba divng on Utila is absolutely incredible. Whilst diving on Utila I`ve seen whale sharks, nurse sharks, dolphins, seahorses, jellfish, huge fish, tiny fish, incredible coral, small wrecks, bigs wrecks and seen literal abysses which drop to thousands of metres below me. I plan on doing a lot of diving on the rest of the trip, and while I can´t expect to have the same experiences as diving on Utila, I can only hope that some of the other places will equal it.

Life on the surface has been great as well. I became a manager at the Bundu Cafe (the busiest and largest restaurant on Utila), as well as becoming the Utilan quizmistress on a friday evening (yes, I am now the queen of useless trivia) for the Bundu pub quiz, and still found time between diving and working to have fun at some of the many bars with some of the many friends I`ve made. I also made one very special friend- I adopted an albino lab rat that a friend was given and didn`t want. While rats aren`t the most exciting or cute pets to own, they`re very intelligent. Harold Gunterson the 3rd (named just to confuse the Spanish speakers of the island) became a regular sight around the dive shop and now everyone (even the ones that were scared of him at first) have come to love him. Spare time is spent going to the beach or sitting on a dock and sunbathing, snorkelling around some of the closer sites, sitting in Bundu, reading, watching DVDs on fish identification, listening to music, cycling around the island and just generally having fun. The party atmosphere on Utila is always present, which contributes to it´s friendly atmosphere, as that´s the way that people meet new friends.

Life on Utila isn`t always perfect- long days and hard work is essential, contrary to popular belief, and diving so frequently takes it`s toll on your body and you feel absolutely exhausted sometimes from all the lifting and carrying and the crazy infections your body picks up from being in the water all the time, and as a divemaster, I`ve seen a lot of crazy students underwater, and have had to help tame them and refine their dive skills (though the best thing about them is the anecdotes I get to tell in the pub), and unfortunately, sometimes we have to use our skills that we learned on the rescue course, which is something that everyone who has been through the rescue course knows, you never want to have to use. I had to use my skills with a diver who came up to the surface and started panicking, which lead to her hyperventilating, which lead to falling unconscious on the boat. When she came to she was showing all the classic symptoms of having decompression sickness (the bends) and we treated her accordingly. We worked well as a team, and got her to the hyperbaric chamber to be recompressed and she made a full recovery, but at the time, it wasn’t only the diver with DCS that was scared. What I learned from the experience was tremendous- how well I coped in an emergency, faced with such a serious illness, and the realisation that I could cope with that situation improved me greatly as a diver as it gave me a confidence in my abilities that I’d never had before.

A few weeks ago, I made my first trip to the mainland since arriving on Utila, and while it was extremely odd to leave the little island, even for a day, and get various supplies like clothes and pillows and spices and other things that island life doesn’t provide, and to have to dredge up all the Spanish that I’d forgotten in the three months that I`d been on the island, I got a small buzz out of going somewhere different and seeing new things. Over the next week or so the sensation of island fever really got to me and the thought of moving on became more and more persistent until I decided to book my onward ticket from the island so that I could resume my adventure once more. I can’t pinpoint one exact reason for realising that I wanted to move on, though it was probably a combination of many things- working so hard, everyone on the island knowing me and my business (no matter how insignificant the event, everyone always knew of it!), and the knowledge that I still wanted to see the rest of the world, and while ever I was on Utila, I was eating into my time elsewhere, and so I decided it was time to leave. I spent a tough few days trying to work out where I was going to go from Utila- I knew that diving was now an essential part of my life, and I also knew that having spent so much money on dive courses, I had to have a backup in case that I couldn’t find work in dive shops. New Zealand seemed like the obvious choice.

So, last Tuesday, after many leaving parties, and saying goodbye to many incredible friends, I left Utila and started my journey again. I’d just like to say a few thank yous to various people I met- Lance, Mark, Jared, Amo, Manuel, Charles- thanks for being such a great team! UnderWaterVision- thanks for making it such a great experience (I bet there’s no where else in the world that you can go diving with a pirate!), the Bundu gang- thanks for always smiling, especially in the faces of Bundu Dogs!