Recently one of our dive masters ran off with our course director to complete their instructor development course and instructor's exam over in Gozo, here's their story....
As I put my second bag onto the conveyer belt the woman at the check-in desk politely informed me that I was £234 over my baggage allowance. This was not a good start to the journey, I re-shuffled the contents of my bags joined a different queue and managed to charm, confuse and blag my way into not paying any excess. A better start to the journey.
The plane touched down in Malta and Gozo Aqua Sports (GAS) had very kindly organised my journey to them on the island of Gozo via a couple of taxis and a ferry. I was a bit worried about how to get from the accommodation to GAS and was relieved to step from the 1940’s stretched Mercedes limo to find that my hotel was two doors away from GAS’ front door. Well I say hotel, it was more of a flat and a lot nicer than my flat back in the UK, two bedrooms, two balconies, two bathrooms and a roof garden- now that is good living!
The teaching itself was mostly in a classroom and involved many hours of study; a 16 hour day seemed to be the norm and it is amazing how quickly we all adapted to this routine. Turning up on time was not a problem, it just took a while for the coffee to kick in, like a couple of hours. Unsurprisingly, we also had lessons in the sea. The Mediterranean offers some fantastic visibility, I think it’s fair to say that we averaged about 30 to 40 metres at about 19’C for the whole of the two weeks!
There were many criteria to be filled and the diving was not primarily for pleasure although we did manage to get quite a few highlights in. I finally managed to see an octopus in the wild which has been a dream of mine for quite a while now, he was only a small critter but watching him change shapes and colours was pretty jaw dropping. We also heard pilot whales calling, just off into the blue from us, it took me ages to figure out what it was, I’d never covered the diving signal for “it’s pilot whales you idiot” and couldn’t understand why everyone was gesturing ‘big’ and ‘steering wheel’ at me… oh that’ll be pilot whales then will it?
The two best dives in my opinion were 1) the inland sea and 2) the Karwella. The inland sea, as the name suggests, is an inland, saltwater body of water, that has a cave in one of the surrounding walls. The cave is just about big enough to get a boat through on the surface and big enough to get about 6 double deckers through underneath; one on top of another. The dive entry point starts of at 2m and drops to about 28m at the other end by which time you have made it through the tunnel and are in open sea. The dive through the tunnel itself makes my hairs stand on end just thinking about it. It was absolutely stunning; it would have been nice if my camera hadn’t died upon arrival in Gozo to share some of the amazing light displays and images of friends floating through the blue abyss that are etched onto my mind.
The Karwella was equally fun. Heading about 160’ out from shore and a 5m plateau quickly plummets into dark blue. It was very hard to stop myself from smiling and thinking “this rocks!” as we descended far enough to see the sea floor. Out we glided across the sandy plain and a great big wreck appeared from the distant blue veil. This dive was about 33m at the main deck level and the clarity of the water reminded me of wreck diving in Egypt- certainly didn’t remind me of wreck dives I’ve done in the UK! Sadly, because of the depth we couldn’t hang around too long and we returned to the 5m plateau where we were met by many shoals of fish and had plenty of goofing around whilst off gassing during our safety stop, after all let’s not forget diving is supposed to be fun!
The two weeks of learning, training and exams was extremely good fun and easily the most fun of all the courses I have done with PADI. The people really made this course as good as it was, our Course Director was fantastic, with a wealth of diving experience that is probably second to none. Our Staff Instructors also helped keep us in check and were invaluable when it came to morale boosting, ordering pizzas and helping us keep sane. I also would love to recommend Gozo Aqua Sports to anyone who is interested in diving in Gozo – their organisation and ability to cater for all needs really is outstanding. I also have to mention Kat and Neill, my fellow students and thank them for the two weeks of laughter that we all managed to have whilst kinda bricking ourselves about why we were there and what we were doing!
