Margaritas & miaows

Diving in Lakshwadeep

Gorgeous!! Awesome!!! Blue!!!Oh help, I'm running out of superlatives for our diving holiday... after almost being a non-starter what with the tsumani & government cancellation of ship to Cochin. (Apparently, tourists are not a priority for the ship to Lakshwadeep -err, then why is it run by SPORT - some silly acronym for the Tourism in Lakshwadeep)
Reaching Kadmat was quite testing, since we had a charter flight in a itsy bitsy propeller plane by Taneja Aerospace& Aviation Company (I still have the boarding pass, I couldn’t get over the ambitious name) to Agatti and a 7-hour boat-ride from there to Kadmat.
So, anyway the first day of Diving 101 was snorkeling about in the lagoon. But we did not have the time to look at the fishies because we had to do all this tough stuff like take our masks off and flood our snorkels with water and then spit it out.
After testing our snorkelling skills, we started with lagoon sessions. The basic skills for diving – are mask clearing and regulator recovery, so we were supposed to spend like 2 days in the lagoon, with sissy 3feet water doing that.
Ok, not so sissy since I totally freaked out about having to take my mask off underwater. I sorely tested Seemant (the dive-master) patience - actually I forgot about the air-tank on my back which gave me nice, clean air through the mouth-piece. There’s a lot of conscious effort in this sport, since one has to really focus on breathing through the mouth and buoyanacy control and moving slow. It's not quite a natural sport - us, not having the gills and all. Anyway, after being reminded of mouthpiece in mouth and yogic breathing in 3meter deep water, I got super confident and did a lovely cruise around the lagoon – saw a very cool mud-coloured sting-ray just mucking around in the sand.
The open-water sessions went much better - I was calm, composed and oh, the other people sucked!!! Thank you thank you guys for making me look good.
The resort is not the greatest, since it’s the only one there and we really did not have achoice for board & lodging. Lunch & dinner were crazy coconut delights – the f&b was lucky we got so starving after the dives - I’m trying to override the coconut taste with lots of fried papad. Had complete mad-cap regress to family teenagedom with Arzan, a crazy adorable 19yr old parsee – we are walking around doing bad arnold impersonations.
For the 1star certification, we need six open water dives which were wonderful – so much more fun that the training lagoon sessions. By the end of the week we had done six dives around Kadmat at intriguiningly named dive-sites and cool fishies and underwater critters:
Kadmat East-Lagoon - Potato Patch 1 & 2 - coral, parrotfish, squirrelfish, triggerfish...
Kadmat West Lagoon - The Wall - A green turtle, a white-tip reef shark, leopard moral eels and a lobster who did not appreciate us looking into his under the sea apartment.
Kadmat South-side - Jack Point - A juvenile reef shark totally checked us out - not quite the friendly ‘oh hello, oh hello’ that the sweet-lips was doing but more like a beady-eyed ‘You’
re lucky you are not my natural prey’
After very many threats by Sumer, our dive-instructor, everyone finally finally swam in correct positions, maintaining correct buoyancy, etc etc on the very last dive. Husband dearest and I are now 1-star divers, and already planning the next holiday. If I give up partying for six-months, I'll save up for 20 dives - I'm going to try (not very hard though)
Oh, and I have to thank husband dearest for extremely good behavior and no deep, meandering insights during the whole trip.

To dive in Lashwadeep contact Lacadives - www.lacadives.com

posted by Nish @ 11:18 AM