Shark Battle Royale!

In a humourous fashion it would appear my ink isn't waterproof. No matter. Today was the day of the infamous shark dive. Woke up early and checked out. Met two guys while waiting who were also to be collected for the shark diving crazy times (steve and mikel). Once we arrived we were briefed, and 3 girls there had been on manta ray island and were at the same poultry level of diving skills as I was. On the website, they suggest that you should have done 20-40 dives plus deep dived. We had done 6 dives and only to a max of 18 metres. It was apparently fine though, as 8 dive masters were going down with 10/12 of us, perfectly safe. We sorted out our equipment, which included a wetsuit, that thanks to Steve, I didn't put on backwards.

The dive is actually split into 2 dives, an inital dive where you dive to 30/31 metres, and crouch behind some coral as the feeders start enticing loads of fish, including some massives ones to come along. All this is about 1-2 metres away, after 17 minutes we retreat up to another dead coral ledge at 17 metres and we began to see 1 or 2 grey tipped reef sharks. After a bit longer we went up a more, and were about a metre away from some grey & black tipped reef sharks. Reef sharks are about 1 to 2 metres long, and seemed quite docile. After returning to the boat, we had an hour surface interval with tea and cookies. Steve told me about lots of cool sounding wrecks from WW2 off the coast of Scotland.

The second dive was only to 10 or so metres and involves the big guys. 3 to 3.5 metre bull sharks, about 8 of them, huge mouths, looked quite ferocious and they were all about 2 metres from us. Lots of other fish and reef sharks around. Great fun and I bought a DVD of the dive to be sent home for mummy to watch.

After being dropped off, Steve and I grabbed lunch while discussing various diving related tomfoolery. I then had to wait for my coach back to Nadi. When I got on it, it was fully packed, but very quickly there were only 3 of us going all the way to Nadi. I spent most of the journey watching episodes on my Zen. The evening consisted of chatting with all the Skylodge staff, who still remembered my name, washing and drying clothes (thanks to the mystery person who folded ALL my clothes, you are legendary), eat some crazy lamb dish, typing up loads of my blog, and swapping my entire dark materials books for a crappy selection of books. I also bumped into Boran again, who was pretty flustered as he had left his passport on Mana island, had a flight in the morning and couldn't get hold of anyone anywhere important. Scary stuff.

Meanwhile I hid from a gaggle of 26 Norwegian overally excited girls.