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Tech Diving Articles |
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| Dont Shortcut the Learning Curve |
Picture this: Two divers, both with doubles, on a boat moored over a wreck. One has a failed regulator, but elects to dive anyway; after all, it isn't very deep. Being dry-suited he places his working regulator on the left post to allow suit inflation.
Into the water and down to the wreck. They run a guideline in and both divers enter the wreck. An entanglement, a silt out; the dive is turned and the first diver exits ahead of his buddy and waits, and waits... and waits until finally he has to ascend.
 I'm sure you can guess the rest. When the body was recovered, the tanks were empty; the right post had rolled open to let everything escape. The victim was an open water diver wearing technical equipment; shutting down a valve in a crisis was not likely to be in his problem-solving repertoire. If you have technical training you will probably see many other problems in this scenario than just the rolled open valve that finally tipped the scales and senselessly wasted a human life.
The point here is that all too often diving accidents aren't accidents. Getting struck by lightning on the way to work tomorrow would be an accident, a random event. Getting badly injured or worse killed, in the water tomorrow probably wouldn't be. Many diving accidents are not random, they happen when a diver gets into a situation for which they were not trained, in to an environment where they are unable to cope or when stress builds to a level beyond which they are able to deal with.
Technical diving affords more opportunity for fast moving stressful situations to unfold than many other avenues of our chosen sport. Understanding this, more than anything else, will keep you out of trouble and possibly save your life. We all have limits and no one is bulletproof.
Formal training bestows the knowledge and skills, the base from which you gain the understanding and confidence to make good in water and out of water decisions. Water skills sessions build on existing ability level and develop your readiness and capacity to respond in new situations. It is paramount that you and your instructor make an honest appraisal of your performance after each session.
While your instructor should serve as sound motivator and good role model the correct attitude to apply the skills and knowledge you gain from any formal training is ultimately down to you.
For technical training, more than any other, choose an instructor you respect and whose judgment you trust and remember that the learning curve takes time. While you may want to push ahead as your confidence increases take a moment to stop and think about the above scenario - without training and the proper application of that training what lies ahead can bite you very hard indeed.
Become completely familiar with one set of conditions before you raise the bar. For example, there is a big increase in the required gas and ascent management skills coming up from eighty meters as opposed to fifty. While you may be comfortable handling a situation in fifty meters - don't find our how different it is in eighty meters the hard way. If your instructor is discouraging you from the next level of training or the next depth there is probably a good reason, don't be afraid to give it a little more time. Time allows you to obtain and become familiar with equipment you'll need and to acquire the physical fitness you may not yet have to be comfortable with greater decompression obligations and exposures. Time is also important meet (and exceed) the prerequisites for your next course and time, just once or twice, to make a mistake you can recover and learn from.
The sad truth is that many divers do not know how unprepared they are for any given situation and its only an emergency that wakes them up. Nothing can replace solid training and practice of emergency skills, avoid the attitude that says: "I've cracked it, this is easy." Keep learning and look for the best courses and instructors possible to further yourself
Your level now is baseline, as you build on it remember that if you go too far, too fast; there is a very, very fine line between a bad dive and a body recovery.
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| Team Diving - Safety and Success |
The terms team diving and technical diving tend to go hand in hand. Any training manual from any agency will give you that.
The question I wanted to throw out is whether many technical divers have ever actually participated in a truly functional dive team, or even fully grasped what the term actually means? Sad to say, from observance of the many people that pass through our hands for training and diving, the answer to the question can quite often be ‘No'.
This is a real shame. Quite apart from the obvious loss of a genuine safety benefit, they are losing out on the tremendous power of a team to make things easy for themselves, to achieve success, and thereby experience a vastly enhanced sense of satisfaction, reward, and of fun. Lets remember that fun is a goal not to lose sight of when operating at the technical levels. Unfortunately again I seem to often see technical divers not enjoying it anymore. Maybe they got into it for the wrong reasons, their expectations were off to start with, but often times they seem to be making things just that bit too difficult for themselves to get the results and therefore the fun, out of their dives. Then they drop out. Good teams don't seem to have that problem. By teams here, I'm talking in the broadest sense, everything from a buddy team on straightforward deep reef, to assemblies of maybe dozens of highly focused exploration level divers.
Some reading this will understand exactly the issues I am raising. You've been there yourselves. Others might be just a little hazy on the benefits I'm pointing to, so I'll attempt to illustrate by example.
Take success of a dive as a benefit of team work. At one end of the spectrum we have examples like the recent extensions of the Doux de Coly in France. Just eleven volunteers, lead by Michael Waldbrenner and Reinhard Buchaly, in a mere seven days, set up and push a coldwater, 60m deep cave to a distance over 5400metres.
Somewhere in there, was some very, very slick teamwork, and with the results achieved, some very proud and happy men. Rightly so as these are repeatable, incident free performances. The procedures are down pat.
Most of us will never get near a dive like that, though we can measure success in similar terms – we were happy about our dive, we had a good time. Countless dives I've made with regular buddies, we broke no new ground that day but the dives were perfect. Clockwork, completely relaxed. Even the inky black winter ones were smooth as silk. No separation issues, the same directional decisions, finding ourselves interested in looking at the same things, edging shallow at the same time with barely more than a nod of acknowledgement, and feeling the security of a partner watching, giving full attention through the whole of the deco. The way it should be. Those who have had the pleasure of diving with a buddy like that know the mood the dive creates, even if there wasn't much going on, you dived well, you knew it, and felt good about it afterwards. The teamwork created the atmosphere and the team grew stronger.
With dive partners like that you have what it takes to break some new ground when the opportunity arises, to extend yourselves a little. I have clear recollections of visiting wrecks here, where many have dived before, we dropped in, tied off, reeled down a few sets of stairwells - engine room hatch at 70m. Nobody had seen it yet but we got it first dive. It's so easy when you work and think together. The same sense of satisfaction came from diving in Truk. Routinely getting back on board with video footage of parts of the ships that even the liveaboards crew didn't know existed. Again, knowing each other, each others gear and how to help, each others thoughts. Down go the stress levels and up comes the ability to focus on the dive, and out comes, not a world record by any stretch of the imagination, but an experience that makes it worth every cent you've spent on getting to that level.
Contrast that to diving with a non-buddy. One who keeps you on edge wondering what they're up to next, that you weren't happy with how they set up or checked their equipment ( ie/ your equipment if something goes wrong ), who had different ideas on deco schedules, on gases and how to mark them, who wasn't paying attention to you during the oxygen stop. How are you going to enjoy a dive like that? How are you ever going to break new ground and feel yourself growing as a diver when you are on your toes the whole dive watching ‘buddy' , rather than buddy making it easier by being on the same page? No team spirit, no fun, no progress.
Success and reward aside, another benefit of good teamwork is safety. Examining this issue can lead us to look at what is, and what is not, a team, and into some quite contentious areas. My opinions come from things I have witnessed in years of being around the water, but they remain opinions. Make of them what you will.
A big, basic point for me is that a team of one is not a team. And is not a group of individuals doing their own thing and calling it a team. A team stays together. Have I ever dived alone? Yes. Will I ever do it again? No. With open eyes one has to admit that, safety wise the track record is appalling, and as often as not it's experienced divers that are lost. Last month in the States an instructor died on Closed Circuit, found dead in 12m of water having swum off alone. That hit the headlines because of the equipment used, but there are so many more that don't make world news. A few miles from my home a visiting instructor died this summer. He began a dive with a group, had been no deeper than 6 or 7m meters, indicated he had difficulties, was escorted back to 3m by a guide where he waved him away and signaling he would surface, alone. His body was recovered three hours later on the bottom, weight belt off, air in tank. What happened? Good question. Nobody will ever know. If he was having physiological difficulties on the surface even the worst of buddies should have made a difference. Start searching the net for accident reports and make a list of those that were solo at the start, or became solo during the dive and were never seen alive. How many times do the reports have comments like “he jumped in the water and descended ahead of everyone else and we lost track of him” or “ we got separated at the start of the ascent but I didn't worry because that happens a lot with us”. Although others were present, these people were effectively alone when things went wrong, and nobody knows what happened. What are people really thinking when they dive that way? The answers escape me.
Now try and find an accident report where a cohesive, attentive buddy pair or team, got into difficulties and someone developed a problem which despite the best efforts of the others, there was nothing that could be done to save them. This is a very, very rare case. One could possibly site the loss of Dennis Harding, who was diving rebreather with open circuit buddies, one of whom got low on air and the gas share was mis-managed resulting in a fatal blow up to the surface. However we touch on another important concept for successful team diving. That of standardizing equipment and its relationship to handling problems, or non-standardizing and its ability to, at worst, create them, and at least, hinder the success of the dive.
I think back to the early days of my own technical diving, years ago to an era of ‘anything goes', if it works for you its ok. Nowadays I tend to feel differently. I think back to the times of wandering around pre-dive looking at everyone's hoses, this long hose on the left, this one stuffed, this inflator on such and such, this guy dives his isolator half shut, oh, and here comes so and so with a modified rebreather, and this for bailout.
  These were generally divers who were skilled, vigilant and aware, not beginners by any stretch, but how I ever convinced myself that handling an emergency would be anything other than a disaster I fail to see. It was all so unnecessarily complicated, which brings us back to the ‘being able to concentrate on the dive' issue. All of us involved in that Flying Circus are still diving together, but things have naturally progressed to all diving the same, simple, Hogarthian rig. Now we know exactly how to get help from each other, and don't waste valuable time kidding ourselves that we've figured out how to solve this and that peculiar problem, which probably would never work under stress any way. We gear up, its quick and easy, we can relax on the dives as we know where everything is, and we're doing dives effectively now which I honestly believe would have been desperately unsafe, or from a practical standpoint, completely unachievable five years ago. We all had our water skills back then, but sensible standardized gear wasn't there to compliment the package and support the team's abilities.
A related area which also has great bearing on team success and safety is using like gases and willingness to run the same schedules. Bottom gas is obvious. Never let a team member dive air while you have trimix for example. Get yourself in current, a swim back to an upline, an air diver in deeper water will have no tolerance to that, they'll be disabled by CO2 narcosis and an absolute liability to themselves and everyone around. Dive the same gas, and given a modicum of fitness, you'll all have the same exercise tolerance and know when to call it quits. Together. Switch things around, you are on trimix, you need to share gas, and someone donates a long hose with air or a weak mix. If you're in trouble, you do not need this complication.
Decompression gases are equally as important. Use the same ones all the time and a familiar pattern of stops should sooner or later emerge. You won't really need a slate with nine different run times on it. The ascents will start to feel easy, adjustments for loss of gas or overstay become intuitive. Use the same ascent gases as your partners too. Obviously gas switches are a critical event in any decompression and you must watch each other carefully for error, or unforeseen hitches. Firstly it should be clear that you check each other for correct switch, which means you must be in the same place in the water column. Imagine a buddy going to oxygen at depth by mistake, and you don't spot it. The situation you are now in when your buddy has a seizure is : 1) avoidable in the first place, and 2) extremely serious for you who must now effect a rescue in the middle of your deco. Less dramatic problems also can happen on switch points, where someone with you is of great comfort. Did you ever not notice the jellyfish tentacle around the mouthpiece you were switching too? Or simply have a clogged or dislodged diaphragm and get little but water? Surely, one should be able to manage their own airway through the coughing fit, but there is nothing like a partner appearing right in front of you with a functioning regulator to donate just in case. Good teams notice and fix these things – in fact not just notice, they are ready for them. On a less alarming but more practical note, if a team all carries same gases, everyone is in a position to hand off gases to a diver who has, for example, had a regulator fail, and everyone knows how to use that gas within the team schedule. That level of confidence in your ability to support each other in water, again brings us back to allowing you to feel good about safely taking on bigger dives. Making progress and having a good time.
One could fill a book with the Do's and Don'ts of Team Technical Diving. Here I've simply tried to paint a picture of the basics as they've revealed themselves to me, both through my own activities, and many times by pointers delivered by more seasoned divers. In diving I'm primarily interested in enjoying myself, and in staying safe. The concepts above have kept me that way, and far from becoming limited by the standardization of procedures, gases and equipment, they have allowed me to participate in dives that would have been impossible any other way. If you don't feel you have a fully sympathetic buddy or team in your regular diving, it can be a long road to get things changed around. Start with the simple question of whether you really are aware of each other and watching each other as much as you should. And be honest in your appraisals. If you think you could do better, fix that first. Its really question of convincing yourself that it is important to stay together. That's an easy goal. If buddy isn't convinced…find a new buddy. Anything can happen to you in the water, alone or otherwise, but if someone sees it happen, a very good chance you'll get saved. Following that step, you should naturally start to see things in the same light and automatically work towards common goals. Then, as many of us have, you may start to find a new level of satisfaction in your diving. CLOSE |
| Wreck Training - A Personal Perspective |
“Decompression ceiling, cave or wreck, it's all the same. If it comes to a problem you can't just go up”. How many times I've heard or read these words I'm not sure, but thinking back and scratching my head it actually amazes me to think that that I once accepted this as being true!
Re-evaluating that statement was one of the things that started to happen the moment my formal wreck training began. All of that open water deep diving experience, the notion that I'd got everything pretty well worked out and that there couldn't be that much more to it than I was already accomplishing, that belief began to fall apart as soon as the course began taking shape. It opened the door on a vast new field of skills and techniques that one has no option but to get to grips with and attempt to master, and forced a complete reappraisal of the ‘ decompression and overhead are all the same ‘ philosophy. They are not.
My training was conducted with long time dive buddies as classmates, in the capable hands of Alex Santos of IANTD. It began with a dry dive. A line drill simulating a penetration around a kids playground. Straightforward so far, a few minutes of work and we were advised that we'd reached thirds on our imaginary air supply and should head out. Simultaneously our instructor blindfolded us. The unthinkable happening – total light failure. We groped sightless along our guideline until politely informed “ Sorry lads, you're dead now.” This was rude awakening number one. If it had taken five minutes to go in on a third of the available air, then ten minutes worth was available to exit. Time was up and we had drowned. The simple lesson, don't ever, ever rush a penetration or you will be faced with having to rush out if in difficulty.
Beyond such starkly illustrated points, the four days and more than eleven hours spent inside wrecks served to highlight just how much better a supposedly polished technical diver has to become to be genuinely slick on a penetration dive. What did I begin to reflect on? Perfect buoyancy doesn't give you much without perfect trim and perfect propulsion skills as partners. Communications and awareness? An instinctive ability to assess another divers mental state and stress level by their body language comes easily with years of instructing. But real, effective, light signals, a range of clear and non-ambiguous hand signals, the decision to go to touch contact in a silt out, all were new and required a good degree of conscious effort.
New motor skills and co-operation within a team? Cruising a wall, eyeing the fish, watching each other shoot an SMB and do a gas switch – easy. Add clean, fuss free stage drops and retrievals, S-drills with all three lights, choice of primary and secondary tie offs and correctly placing oneself to illuminate for a buddy doing a line wrap or retrieving a reel. Constant surveillance for line traps, taking up slack line for the reel handler, checking valves for roll offs every time you have been near something, awareness of line position when diving away from it, never allowing another diver to be behind you when reeling out of the wreck, and simply knowing what is happening to everyone in the water at all times These are all small things when taken in isolation, but for the big picture, they need to come together without thought. Seeing an experienced instructor monitor us so effortlessly was an eye opening experience.
And then we have equipment. Funny how so much of mine went in the bin right after the course. All those things that were never a problem in open water where they have no capability to distract or give trouble. Those big plastic fins, that catch line with their buckles, and the video of myself that persuaded me it wasn't just my technique that was causing the mess. The SPG hose that was four inches too long and hung up the gauge at every opportunity. Ditto the back up inflator. It was the last time I ever wore a double bladder. Lights that burn less than a couple of hours? No help. Reels with handles and lock screws, or a simple unjammable spool? That was no contest. Plastic manifold knobs – now I know they can break! In short it will become apparent that anything that is not helping you in the water will become abundantly clear, and usually at just the wrong moment.
Last of all I came back to that analysis of the situation in which I was now placing myself, four decks deep inside a battle cruiser versus decompressing in open water. The reality myself and others have found is, if someone is having a physiological emergency, a buoyancy blow up, gets tangled in their SMB, or has nothing left to breathe, then decompression or otherwise, you can go to the surface and fix it. Getting back down quick enough will then fix you too. Getting silted out and stuck under tons of steel, that choice and ability to buy time is absolutely not available. I felt how environmentally committed I was in ways I have never felt in open water. This realization clearly hammered home to me the need to do things properly. Good technique, good planning, a team you trust and the right gear.
That accepted, the thrill and reward of becoming a capable wreck diver are beyond measure. I've had the good fortune to since lay eyes on sights that I know nobody has ever seen before. All told I would recommend this to anyone with a desire to see themselves grow as a diver. It doesn't have to be deep, it doesn't have to start difficult, but it can be an enthralling activity and you will probably never look back. CLOSE |
| A Piece Of Pacific History |
November 1944, in the wake of the huge Naval Battles of Leyte Gulf and the return of MacArthur, the rest of the Japanese forces in the Philippines were under daily attack from American carrier borne air strikes. From Leyte itself to the ports on the west coast of North Luzon, and all points in between, Japanese shipping was suffering continued losses. Many of the Aircraft Action reports are now declassified and one fell into our hands of particular interest as the air raid was relatively local - just fifty miles away on NW Marinduque. Here, on November 25th, four warships had been sighted and attacked. The two sunk were reported as minelayers by the pilots ( fast transports T6 and T10 in a US Navy Chronology of events for 1944 ), both some 90m long. Further records show fast transport T9 and escort destroyer Take as having escaped.
As the below aerial photos show, two vessels experienced huge explosions as they went down, and the question in our minds as we set off to locate them was whether anything significant would be left.
Having left at midnight and punched all night into heavy seas we finally hit Marinduque and voted for straight into the harbour, anchor up, and eat. That done, phase two was hunt the fisherman, since the depth sounder was giving readings of 156m in the area where the photos had us, and for ships at anchor that seemed a bit much. Forget electronics and resort to local knowledge. Some young guys were fishing on a shoal in the harbour, but it was the old guy whose attention we'd attracted who counted most. Self assuredly paddling ahead of us, lining up fixes nobody else was probably aware of, he motioned us to anchor. Down it went… and it held. Wreck hunting at its finest this, no big budget. A bottle of Rum and a cigarette was all it took.
Two buddy pairs, Thierry Minet with ‘Tex’ Song and Bill Moore with Steve Cox, set themselves up and entered what looked to be very blue water. Thirty meters below though, was no real distinction between suspended sediment and actual seabed. Just a transition zone into talcum powder fine silt, limiting visibility so severely that Steve and Bill found no wreck despite being apparently anchored to it. Tex and Thierry had more luck and surfaced after a twenty five minute tour of what Tex believed was bow wreckage. Once everyone knew what they were dealing with - a debris field in a silt out - dive two became a game of hunting for identifiable ship structures. Bill being an ex-Navy man, and whose father had been involved in the Pacific campaign, was especially entertained by grubbing around looking for bits he could recognize. All of us too, had time to reflect on what events must have been like in this quiet cove almost sixty years ago. This ship, and all aboard, had met a violent and sudden end.
Our fisherman friend reappeared at the end of the afternoon, and let on that he'd show us the second wreck in the morning. Something more to look forward to as we anchored M/V Rags up for the night. True to his word out came our guide next morning, and after about quarter of an hour of plumbline work with a fishing weight he had us on minelayer number two. Or similarly, what was left of it. This one, Bill felt sure, was a ships decimated stern, shaft and bearings still identifiable. The locals actually believe this is two halves of the same ship, but this doesn't tally with the pictures, and they were too far apart to be related. A shame there is not more left to see of these vessels, but all told a tremendous success to have been able to find these remains so easily, and to get a glimpse of but one small chapter of the regions wartime history.
Many more sinkings occurred nationwide around the end of '44. For interests sake and the potential of diving we shall be trying to pin down more in the coming year.
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| South Luzon - The Otavi Wreck Trip Report Aug. 2007 |
A chance conversation with Nathan Floro of Adventure Bound early in the summer sparked the idea of a trip to Sorsogon to dive a mysterious shipwreck, dubbed the Otavi Wreck, that nobody so far had put a name to. The ship lies in the straits between Ticao Island and the town of Bulan in Sorsogon. It had actually been some years since Nathan or his partners had dived there ( most of their focus being on whale shark watching in nearby Donsol ) and recollections on exact depth ( 50-80m ) and size and nature of the wreck were hazy.
Knowing that early August would see several guests with Tech Asia who could be easily prodded into something new, we began to plan out an excursion to give the wreck a look. Logistically this required some effort. Moving equipment and helium began about ten days ahead of time, via Nathan, to a staging point in Legaspi. The intent was to open up a resort on Ticao for a few days and use the facilities there to support the dives. Normally everything is closed this time of year as the SW monsoons rough up the water and make the area generally undiveable…but this had been such a good summer so far….
With all equipment shipped, air tickets bought, and gas paid for, of course a tropical storm appeared in the Philippine Sea. It was tracking north but close enough to stir up the normal monsoon winds and make it impossible for local boats to even locate and mark the site, and cause all flights to Legaspi to be cancelled the day before our scheduled arrival. Phone calls and emails flew, but all divers voted to go ahead and hope things cleared up. Sam, Dave and Nathan touched down in Legaspi City on a very windy Thursday afternoon as intended, and several hours were spent in the home of local Instructor and “fixer”, Conz Paz, assembling all the doubles, rigging deco tanks and prepping as far as we could.
The big dilemma at this point, with divers committed and due in the following day, was where to attempt to run the dives from. The weather was lifting but the risk with going out to Tikao island was in getting stuck there. The alternative seemed to be the town of Bulan three hours drive south, where a compressor could be had, and a fill station improvised. The argument against it was lack of decent accommodation. A good two hours of tense and lively debate, phone calls, what ifs, and options continued, until we finally had a plan to stand on. That being – drive to Bulan next day and make the best of it. The wonderful air of calm that followed the final decision though, was shortlived, Nathan, watching the evening news through the window of Conz’ house casually observing “ Oh look, the volcano in Bulan is erupting…”.
Well, volcano or otherwise, the next morning we loaded up and made the beautiful drive south to Bulan. A sleepy little town with a run down resort ( called Sabang Beach in fact ) which was probably really nice when it opened but has now well and truly gone to seed. But, importantly, it was right on the beach where the dive boat moored, and they didn’t care that we drove a two ton truck right into the compound and unloaded a compressor and sixteen tanks of gas in the middle of the grounds.
 It was like camping, but was really all we needed. By four in the afternoon we’d blended all tanks for Day One and left them for local lad to top with about a 2 cfm compressor. One that filled sufficiently slowly to cause Nitrox 50 to actually layer in the tanks and need shaking to actually mix. We believe he sat there till three am. At four in the afternoon a van arrived and Jim Morton, Steve Cox and Brian King fell out of it, having been socialising gently all the way from Ninoy Aquino. As luck would have it Bulan doesn’t really afford the opportunity to turn things into a big night out, so an early dinner at the BBQ stand, and by first light the lads were mooching around setting up their gear. Breakfast was a local brewed coffee and five bread rolls at the fairly affordable price of eight pesos. Good start to the day.
The days first dive was a tough one. Chief trouble was in locating the actual wreck as heavy current dragged the marker below the surface. A very skilled and patient fisherman did his best to re-hook it but it was near midday when everyone got in the water. Current prevailed all the way to the bottom but a reasonable look at the portside down ship was made. The depth to seabed turned out to be spot on 60m. With it being too late to refill all tanks, Sam made a second dive in the afternoon with Michael Puz only, who’d joined early that morning.
 This one was blessed with benign conditions and went perfectly. Interestingly there is a local belief that all previous markers placed on the wreck tend to be pilfered by fishermen. Being out at perfectly slack water though, Sam spotted four or five of the old marker buoys all pop up to the surface around the wreck, revealing that truth of the matter is they’re just too small and 95% of the time the current simply drags them down. A reprieve for the integrity of the fisherfolk.
Subsequent dives also went well, the ship still remains unidentified but a good knowledge of its layout was gained. Actually only around 70m long, 8m or so in the beam, a coastal tanker type vessel, settled on her port side. Divers noticed many fire hoses extended, especially around the bow area of the ship. Also most hatches were open, which brought on some talk about the ship being scuttled – possible as there is very little major structural damage. A local policeman claimed to have information about the ship, stating date of sinking as September 1985 ( but not cause of sinking ), and he also claimed the ship was salvaged for its oil. How much of this is truth and how much was stated for the sake of simply telling us something is wide open to speculation.
The ships superstructure is three decks high, with penetration tight but possible into a small engine room and accommodation areas. The propeller, about 2m diameter is still in place, which would be unusual for a vessel that reportedly underwent some form of commercial salvage. Upper surfaces are well grown over with black coral and marine life very good overall, however Steve Cox carefully contrived to avoid videoing any of it
Future trips here would do well in the normal season, November to about May would be best and blending in the wreck, the whale sharks, the Manta Bowl and some rarely dived deep walls will make a very good mixed itinerary.
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| *** Great compilation of reading materials from us. *** |
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