We woke up bright and early just after sunrise to get our first dive in before breakfast. The water was pretty rough early in the morning, with a swell that was 2-3m high. For the Advanced Open Water course, this was our Deep Dive. We were accompanied by instructor Veronica (Vero). This time I was accompanied by Sara, who has spent the past couple of years working at the US-Australia joint defense base in Alice Springs, and was on the dive trip with her friend Karen, who works at the US Embassy in Mexico City. The dive was not pretty interesting, since our objective was just to go down to a very deep area (23.2m) and experience how we perceive color differently. We didn't see much interesting fish, except for a Khul's stingray. At the bottom of the deep area, Veronica filled up a bottle with air from her regulator, and later when we got back on the boat to debrief she opened it and it made a loud popping noise to demonstrate how much air pressure had built up during the ascent, as a reminder to never hold your breath, especially when going deep.

Back on the boat we had breakfast and got some time to relax, as our next dive wasn't for another 3 hours. The plan was originally to move the boat to a new reef, but the water was too rough to do so. By the time of our second dive, the weather got much nicer, but this wasn't really reflected in the visibility below the surface, as all the dirt is still getting kicked (it turns out the summer is the worst time to dive in the Great Barrier Reef because of poor weather and poor visibility). Our second dive of the day was the Navigation Dive for the Advanced certification, and we went with Veronica again. We swam along a long piece of rope Veronica had brought to count how many kicks we needed to swim a given amount of distance with and against the current. We also had to navigate using only natural landmarks, using only a compass, and swim in a square using the compass. The entire time we also had to keep track of where the boat was (this was really difficult). My buddy was Sara again.

Back on the boat we had lunch and I got to relax while everyone else in the Advanced course either took the Nitrox Certification exam, or completed missing coursework for the Advanced course that I had completed the night before. While we were eating the boat also relocated to a nearby reef called Flynn Reef. Around 2:30pm we started getting ready for our third dive of the day at a site called Gordon's Mooring. At this point a bunch more people had gotten Nitrox certifications, so getting set up took longer since I had to wait for people who were using the Nitrox analyzer. This dive was the Peak Performance (PP) Buoyancy dive for the Advanced course. We went with instructor Veronica again, and my buddy was Sara again. We started by doing a weight check. I was wearing 6kg of weight, which was probably more than I needed, but on the first dive of the trip I had been wearing 4.5kg and had some trouble staying down, so I didn't adjust my weight any further. We went down and Veronica put some spoons in the sand, and we had to swim such that we touched the spoons with only our regulators and then rose back up, which wasn't too difficult. She also brought some hula hoops down, and we had to swim through the hula hoops facing up, facing down, and facing sideways. Facing down and sideways were both pretty easy, but it took me a few tries to do it facing up, because I kept bumping my regulator on the top of the hula hoop.

After dinner we went on another night dive. This time we would be going without a guide, which was a bit of a problem since the Advanced students hadn't gotten to dive Gordon's Mooring during the day, and we had no idea what we were going, so we all paired up with people who had gotten a chance to dive the site already that day. My buddy was Greg, an older Australian guy whose wife was also on the trip, but didn't want to do the dive. We went out in search of some giant turtles that live in Gordon's Mooring, including a notorious one named Bruce. The visibility was terrible because of lots of dirt getting kicked up, but we did eventually manage to find what we think was Bruce near the end of the dive. We went back to the boat where there were lots of sharks circling like last night. We went up, but as we were doing the safety stop I somehow dropped my camera in 10m deep water, so I had to swim down and retrieve it. Luckily the water was not too deep and Greg didn't mind.