Every Tuesday at 1:30pm a person from “The Dive Center” comes to the hotel to offer a free scuba diving lesson in the hotel pool, so knowing this I slept in until about 11am before getting up and cooking up the last of the bacon for breakfast.
It had been raining all morning the clouds over head where pretty dark. I was assuming the rain wouldn’t affect scuba diving much (you’ll be wet anyway!) but without the sun I was thinking the water was going to be pretty chilly!
After chatting with the scuba diving instructor, I decided to give it a go. She
walked me through how the gear works, how to inflate and deflate the jacket,
etc. and before long I hoped in the pool.
The water was pretty cold, but it was bearable and actually better under the
water than on top of it.
It took me 5-10 minutes to be able to breathe through the regulator, my natural
reaction of not breathing in when under water was a little tough to break, but
eventually I got the hang of it. It helped when I started swimming around rather
than just trying to duck my head under.
Before long I was doing laps of the pool underwater, it was pretty fun.
Wearing the vest and weight belt directly on my skin made my dermographia play
up a bit. I was bright red and full of welts but strangely the cold and the rain
soothed it enough that it didn’t bother me too much.
I got the details for booking a session out in the lagoon and went inside to
work out my schedule for the week. I was roughly half way through the trip and
while I intended on prioritising relaxation I also had the goal of trying some
new things. The SUP and scuba diving was new, but there was still room for some
more new experiences so I went to the office and asked Rangi to help make make
some bookings.
I booked a lot of stuff today! A lagoon tour tomorrow with Captain Tama’s (where
I had hired the SUP from), a lagoon scuba dive on Wednesday, a buggy tour on
Thursday and a kite surfing lesson on Friday. I was originally going to do a
paddleboard yoga class on Wednesday, but the forecast for the week seems to be
mostly raining and I think scuba diving will be better than yoga in those
conditions.
After all that was organised, I was going to go for a swim seeming so I was already wet and the rain had subsided for a little bit, but there was a group of people with some very fancy looking recording gear at the pool. I had a quick chat with them and it turns out they were recording a music video for a Kiwi artist named Nikita, she would have been about 17yo but was apparently pretty well known in New Zealand.
I didn’t want to interfere, so I grabbed my book and sat at the gazebo. They
were trying to shoot a scene of Nikita running her hand along the water, but
they couldn’t quite get the shot they wanted. The camera man asked one of the
assistants to get on the water and drag her by the foot, but he wasn’t keen on
getting in. I was already soaking wet so as strange as it seemed, I offered to
help and they were gratefully accepted. So I jumped in and the director
instructed me to hold her by the foot and slowly move backwards dragging her
through the water.
Quite a weird thing to volunteer to do, but we all got a bit of a laugh from it!
After a while I started getting hungry, so I rode down to the convenience store
to get some more bread and tomato sauce before heading back to prepare the food
I had bought earlier for a BBQ.
The BBQ was nice and big, but some of the gas knobs were spinning freely so it
was hard to position them to ‘off’ before turning on the gas. After some trial
and error, I got two burners working well enough to cook my food.
Just as I was finishing up cooking, a few other guys came out to use it too, all
of them from New Zealand (as was almost everyone I’ve spoken to here!)
I had a bit of a chat with them and ate my dinner and just as I finished eating
the rain started again, so I headed inside for the night. It continued to rain
all night which along side the sound of crashing waves in the background is
quite a calming way to go to sleep.