After all those years of doing Discover Divings, I can proudly say I'm finally a certified PADI open water diver!
Tak, ni bukan terjun dalam sawah padi ye... Read
HERE if you don't know what I'm talking about...
My family (except Mum) enjoys activities like this. But because most of our trips were short, we couldn't get the chance to attend the scuba classes. Dad did his in KK. I aaaalmost did mine on my trip to Maldives last year with a bunch of colleagues but had to cancel it and do Discover instead because we had to fit in other activities as well.
You see, to be a certified open water diver, you have to have at least 3 days of your vacation time solely dedicated to the diving classes, both morning and afternoon. There's a 4-day option as well but not sure how they fit in though.
So, dingdongdingdong my sister and I finally took our open water diving course at Pulau Tenggol, Terengganu. At first we wanted to go in April, then postponed to May then June then finally September a few weeks after passing my professional exam.
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| Tenggol Island. Taken from my camera phone. |
Frankly speaking, I've never heard of that place. I've heard of many under-commercialized islands in the east coast like Pulau Sibu and Pulau Rawa but I definitely haven't heard of Pulau Tenggol before.
Until Yasmin mentioned it.
"Hey, do you wanna go get the scuba license?"
"HELL YEAH! Where?"
"I don't know. Sipadan?"
"Chi Sin! There're pirates there!"
"So where do you wanna go?"
"I don't know, where do you wanna go?"
"Let's go Tenggol"
"Tenggol where?"
... krik krik...
Something along that line lah.
PSA: don't do your OWD in Sipadan. Sipadan is waaay too beautiful. You do there, other sites will look mediocre. Dive at Sipadan once you've seen all, trust me.
So anyway, here we are in Tenggol Island, off coast Terengganu. To get here, you have to take a 45-minute boat ride from Dungun jetty and tadaaa! resort right in yo face yo. We stayed at Tenggol Coral Beach Resort for 3D2N.
We arrived about 11-ish on Saturday morning. After getting our keys and moved our bags in our chalet, we went to the diving centre to meet our instructor.
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| Beach view from our room. Relaxing, isn't it? |
Instructor's name is Andy. We chatted for a while before agreeing on a time to meet that afternoon for our first class.
Andy's a funny guy which is awesome 'coz he makes the classes a little less mundane. We had 3 classroom courses, 1 shallow water course, and 3 open water dives. There were 5 modules we had to learn and each of them we practiced near the beach. I enjoyed all the water classes -- not much of the classroom ones though coz we had to watch some videos for an hour or so.
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| Preach it, gurl! |
*clears throat* So anyway...
The second day, the haze managed to catch up! Grr...
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| Jebubu. Eh.. Jerebu |
We finally completed all courses and passed our final exam with diving flying colours! Andy discouraged us to bring our sports cameras to our dives for safety reasons and offered to take his underwater camera instead. So yeah, still waiting for the pictures Andy took of us on our final dive. Will update here once he sends them to me!
While waiting, let me feed you with some pictures we took onshore ait??
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| Haze. No sun. No shadow to see the awesome wordings on the sand :( |
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| With our instructor |
*Update: Andy sent the pictures to the email I gave him but then I realized I gave him the wrong address. BAHAHAHA PODAAAHHH AIDAAAAA MMG KENA HEMPUK DENGAN REGULATOR SEKETUL
Oh well, you guys have to wait longer lah then. AMPUNNN
