Day 12 – TUE - 25/9/12 – Dahab, Egypt
We started the first 1.5hr yoga class this morning. Much of the class was formed around breathing techniques with some stretching and postures today. The techniques were used to teach about the importance of breath and breathing control when diving. The more you can regulate your breathing and the deeper you can control your breath, it enables you to master buoyancy in the water, relax and become an observer by being able to get more out of your tank. The power of Prahna – 'breath' gives you life, as long as you can breath underwater then all is well.
Some stretches were included in the class just to loosen up the muscles and assist with oxygen flow for when we were to dive later. We also met our fellow yogi divers – our teacher Barbara (though she was only doing the yoga), Fiona, Kirsty and Patrick. We were also given a calico bag and encouraged to shop with this bag to avoid more plastic finding its way onto the reef.
Before diving we had breakfast where we tried out the best combinations which we would later have down pat! Monika met us at breakfast and then we collected our kit and headed to the dive location for our dive briefing, followed by our yoga briefing.
Our first dive location was at Banerfish Bay – near Lighthouse. The dive brief was given that we would be focusing on skills needed to dive and it would be assessed. This was due to such a mixed level we had in our group – me needing a refresh, Alan needing to complete open water, Patrick not yet completed all his qualifying dives. We would also be on a sandy bottom and only diving to a depth of 6-7m to enable us to get comfortable in the water again.
The yoga briefing was a discussion about being present and 'breathing'; using your breath to control your buoyancy to constantly maintain neutral buoyancy. Neutral buoyancy means you will be less worn out, relaxed and then progress to be able to just become and observer in the world underwater.
The first dive was amazing and I was very comfortable. I was able to get the feel of buoyancy again and I used the yoga breathing techniques to assist in this and remain calm. We went in for 1 hour on 200 bar and came out with 90 which is fantastic, even though it was for a shallow dive.
The second dive was over Lighthouse Reef with Monika's husband Boris. I was a bit more panicked this time as the regulator came out of my mouth and I struggled a little in buoyancy over the reef as I was afraid of hitting the coral but still managed a 53 minute dive. The fish and coral were great and the water temperature was a very warm 27 degrees with the air temperate being 32 degrees!
We had dinner with Barbara at Hotel Blue where I ate a yummy aubergine roularde. We drove back to the hotel in the back of the ute and spotted goats and camels wandering randomly along the road but with no-one running into them as people know that others own them so won't hurt them. Such a relaxing day and a great refresher for diving.
