After getting my stuff organized a little I met with my dive leader Kutut. He offered me a pancake & drink which I took. It was my first food of the day & was good :) He picked up the bill on it, which was cool. We sat around and talked about my experience & the dive plan. Our first dive was on the USS Liberty which was shipwreck sunk during World War 2 by a Japanese submarine. Shipwrecks are the best because there are always tons of fish & coral grows on the wreck, plus it is just cool to look at underwater. We entered from the rock shore which was rather tough & swam through most of the dive. One big advantage Pro Dive Bali has over every other dive company I have used, is that they provide an underwater camera. Kutut used it for most of the first dive, taking lots of pictures of me, but I used it for the majority of the rest of the dives. He told me that all I had to do is buy a $1 blank CD & they would even burn the pictures for me! The camera was about 2 weeks old & very nice, it takes spectacular pictures. He said originally they had planned to rent it to customers & still might but they wanted to use it some first, so maybe I got lucky on this one. Kutut was also surprised on the dive because I did not need much weight to descend & stay down. He said normally a “big guy” like me would need about 18-21 pounds, where I use 6 pounds. Like I told him my advanced course in Australia had taught me how to dive with much less weight. Also my body composition being more muscular after weightlifting to go along with the extra fat probably helped. Either way it is easier to dive with less weight, because it makes you exert yourself much less, which allows for longer dives :)

After the dive I went back to the room to catch a shower then joined Kutut for lunch which was rather good because I was hungry. The lunch was followed by what was to be scheduled as a quick nap & we were going to dive at 3:30. However, Kutut knew I was tired so he let me sleep until I woke up at 5pm. We went then although he offered to let me do 3 dives the next day. It is really nice to have people who are cool to deal with & nice to be the only customer. On the second dive I learned how to take underwater pictures with the camera which was fun. At first I was moving too much & not getting zoomed in enough. It is amazing but practicing your photo taking underwater helps out so much with your buoyancy because you have to learn how to control it to get the best pictures. We saw so many things on the day but here is a quick list for all my diving friends: Tons of coral, Anemone fish (Nemo), Angelfish, Frogfish, Scorpion fish, Sergeant fish, Banner fish, Sweet Lips fish, Grouper, Stingrays, Harlequin Shrimp, Boxer Shrimp (which would clean your fingernails), Lion fish, Cleaner fish, Dory fish, Moorish Idols, Clown Trigger Fish & Nudibranch, plus many other fish that I don't know by name! Seeing the lion fish was particularly interesting because we had surfaced & even taken a picture of the sunset, but swimming back to the beach I saw him under us. They are so beautiful & we were able to get right up close (they are poisonous so not too close though). Kutut had the camera at that point & was able to get some great pictures. If you look on my dive resume site you will see some of these very pictures below in the header of the site.

After the dive I had supper which was tomato soup, a large bottle of water & a pizza which cost about $4 USD, you have to love that :) I was still adjusting to how little things cost in Bali after coming from Australia. Then I did some reading about Bali from my lonely planet & started researching Thailand. After that I went to bed early (am I lazy or what) & got a good sleep because we were getting up early the next morning to be in the water before 8am to beat the tourists to the wreck for a better dive & so we could see the huge Parrotfish.