Freeflow

Written by Michael Zangerle on 01 June 2010. Posted in Malaysia

As an instructor you have not so many possibilities to guide the certified divers under water. You have more courses running.

But every now and then we guide some fun dives. It is a nice mix, relaxing under water with certified divers knowing what there are doing – most of the time at least.

So I went down with 3 fun divers at Batu Tabir. Two of my divers were experienced (over 100 dives) and had dived with us the last days - about 10 dives. We were just at 14m depth, as I heard a familiar sound - blowing off regulator (free flow).

Instinctively I turned to Peter, he dived with his own regulator and previously had problems. Suddenly he came to me eyes wide open, close to panick, regulator in his hand instead of the mouth.

I grabbed my alternate air source, dived quickly over to him and gave it to him. Then I calmed him first and told everyone in the group that we go up.

While we went up, I turned off Peter’s tank. On the boat we tested how much air he had left in the tank, but the freeflow had been so strong, he had only 40 bar left. After 25 seconds the freeflow released about 160 bar. This meant for Peter waiting on the boat.

That made me realize again how important it is that you dive with a buddy. Peter would not have made it up to the surface with the freeflow regulator. Especially not if he is not keeping it partly in the mouth, breathing out of it. It would have been much safer from him to dive over to me to get the alternate air source if he would have remembered what he learned in his course. But everything went well.

The next day I began a rescue diver course and was able to demonstrate this critical experience in the diving course.

Rats

Written by Michael Zangerle on 01 March 2010. Posted in Malaysia

The first few weeks we heard constantly loud noises from the roof. At night, we woke up and knew these are rats. In the rainy season, when no people are around, they come out of the jungle and nest on the roof.

So we set up some traps and every night we catched 2-3 rats. The diving cats were happy because they got fresh meat. In total we caught 21 rats.

I think it is a faster death with the cats eating them than drowning. But sometimes it was quite hard when they look at you with there little black eyes, totally afraid.

Then we had a beautiful green tree snake in our equipment-area. As the locals basically are afraid of snakes, we wanted to save them before they kill it.

So we checked first with Anke whether the snake is poisonous after giving here a good description. It was a harmless one. Unfortunately it was quite aggressive and one of our boatman made loop and we caught it. Stupidly this loop closed but didn’t open up again therefore it was not so easy to get here out of it again..

We felt a bit like Crocodile Dundee, only that we were not as good as him. But after we placed the snake in the jungle we felt really good. Our first snake rescue excursion. There will follow another one - you can bet on it.

Cayaking

Written by Michael Zangerle on 28 February 2010. Posted in Malaysia

After 23 days working in a row I had finally off. Uff, we can not do this always otherwise you are to exhausted during the season.

Nici and I took a canoe and went out to sea. After about 30 minutes we reached Tiga Ruang - three beaches that can only be reached via boat. We settled down on the smallest of the three beaches and a local came up to us and offered us a beer.

Gratefully declined we went snorkeling first. We had 25 big bumphead parrotfishes. Absolutely brilliant and only two meters away from us. They can get up to 1.2 m and mostly live in fish schools.

After snorkeling, we wanted to relax on the beach. The local came over and brought us a beer what we finally accepted - with a piece of cake. Indeed, even in the middle of the tropics, there is cake. It was funny.

We had a nice day off and after a few hours, we fled from the sun and relaxed listening to an audio book.

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