Lars Hemel: Logbook

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Dive site Coral2 and the Cave at Mun Island.

Our first dive today was nice with plenty of fish and lots of lionfish.

At our second dive we explored a cave which was so deep that you shouldn't be allowed to explore it in full depth. We went in quite deep and saw shrimp, lobster and large school of fish. Some corals were seen here that normally are only spotted at night.

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Diving at the corals near Rom Island, Nhatrang, Vietnam

Rom Island offers a small cave which could be swimmed through. Lots of fish, hiding in the shade. Some big moray eels, and a very nice white moray, which was searching for a hiding place in the sand.

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Mun Island Orcadive Nhatrang

I went on a boat dive trip with the Vietnamese organization orcadive in Nhatrang and I really liked it. The divemasters I dove with where less organized, allowed everything (including entering caves, over one hour dive times, less than 50 bar in your tank before returning etcetera. ) The weather was excellent allowing us to see the colors in their full glory.

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Drift diving around Ko Yawabon

This was a great drift dive around part of Ko Yawabon. I found a clownfish and tried to touch his home, the sticky anemones. But this clownfish was fierce and started biting me. You could feel it pretty well for a 5cm small fish. For the rest we saw a lot of common reef fish and a huge moray. A great dive though.

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Huge lobster at Koh See near the surroundings of Krabi

This was my first dive in Thailand! The water was nice and warm at 28 degrees. The visibility changed from 5 to 15 meter depending on which corner we were diving. We saw big potato cods, a sea snake, a small shark and lots of small fish. At the end I saw the biggest lobster ever. I think his body was about 40cm long with more than a meter long tentacles. Quite impressive, I didn't know they came in sizes like this. 

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Lion Rock and its green and purple plants

Lion Rock was another beautiful dive in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand. We found loads of green leaves on the bottom and they seemed to be growing on purple rocks. My buddy was bragging a lot about his air consumption but in the end we had to go up because he ran out of air and was so stupid not to pay attention. So we had a long surface swim back to the boat.

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First Cold Water Dive on the Rainbow Warrior

This was my first dive i cold water of 19 degrees Celsius. It was extremely cold. We wore 5mm wet suits with boots and head, but in between both dives today I was trembling and drinking plenty of hot soup.

Cold water diving is very different with other types of coral and fish, different marine and plant life. The rainbow warrior is anew wreck (1987) and not completely crowded in fish yet, but its history makes it an interesting dive.

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Last Dive as hostess on a liveaboard

This was another long and pretty dive site. Twin peaks at Saxon Reef seems to be two different coral plates situated next to each other and slightly shallower than the rest. There are thousands of fish swimming around.

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Equilizing and time problems in the group

The Coral Gardens on Saxon Reef are very nice. We went in with three divers but one of us couldn't equalize and had to cancel his dive. My buddy was having problems with his snorkel which took him about 30minutes before we could start the dive. A great dive, but after a 40 minutes dive my buddy got concerned about the boat leaving without us, so we went up.

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Tropos, Norman Reef, Wally and testing my dive master skills

Tropos, the Wall or Troppo Lounge is a very nice dive with plenty of fish. It was a nice wall dive where I had to practice my dive master skills again, since I took one lady out for a dive. She hadn't dived in a long time and they knew I was a dive master so they grouped me with her.

The second dive here was nice as well. I kissed Wally, we dove in between a few swimmthroughs and were completely surrounded by fish.

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Diving with the crazy cameraman underwater and a night dive on Playground, Norman Reef.

Another excellent dive, this time on dive site Playground, Norman Reef. The liveaboard guests brought a cameraman to the reef. He was crazy as we are on film with a sea cucumber on our head, sunglasses on and drinking empty beer cans. Besides this crazy stuff, we saw some clownfish and we went through a very nice swimmthrough.

In the evening we did a night dive on the same reef. We saw a few fish, shrimp, big trevallies, and we found Wally's resting place.

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Wally the huge Wrasse

The Caves at Normal Reef is a very nice dive site. I have never seen so many fish in one spot. One big wrasse, called Wally, liked to be touched. Actually, he really seemed to like human company. We swam through a long 50meter cave. At the end I got stung by a jelly (not the box jellyfish) but nevertheless I was having difficulties of moving my legs; they seemed to be paralyzed for a few minutes.

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Playground dive site at Norman Reef

My first impression was not as good as Saxon Reef but nevertheless a pristine reef with lots of turtles and with a strong current. After a while my buddy took over because I was completely lost of directions. He found the boat back while my impression was that he was diving in the opposite direction.

We also did a night dive which wasn't very spectacular. We didn't even find lobsters and crabs. We did saw a few big trevallies and one shark. Later on, there was a shark feed from out of the boat which showed that there were enough sharks and that they were very hungry.

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Saxon Reef Twin Peaks with huge sharks

This was one of my first dives that I actually saw a few 2-meter tall sharks. One was sleeping under a rock with my face less than a meter away while the other 2 were just swimming around with cleaning fishes around it. It were white-tip reef sharks, some of the more common species of sharks on the Great Barrier Reef.

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Host on Cairns Liveaboard trip

As a host, I went on a liveaboard cruise for a few days. We got free dives, free food and free accommodation in return of helping cleaning the beds, serving the food, doing the dishes for the other paying guests. A very good experience although the owners were too strict in the end and thought they were paying us big bucks so they could use us for all nasty jobs. No way, we were there to dive!

I saw huge strands of fire coral, 1 meter large pipe fishes, turtles, a huge potato cod. At the end we had to look for the boat and had to surface to peek where it was.