Day 52: Goodbye Charlotte!

Vela Luka, Croatia

A lot happened today…. where do I begin?

Morning: During our dive briefing in front of the dive center, we heard this loud bang. We turned to see a yacht, a rowboat broken in half, and 4 kids in the water. Apparently, the yacht totally failed to see the rowboat and crashed straight into it splitting it in half. Good thing the kids on it jumped into the water so there’s all fine. Bobby, Deni and Adam jumped onto our boat, Hercules, and made their way to help the kids and tow their broken rowboat to authority. It was pretty wild! I was so tempted to run into the dive center to grab my camera and document the whole incident. I decided not to, considering, I’d pretty much leave during a dive brief. Billy might give me a good yelling for that. I learnt later that night that the particular rowboat was a professional-grade rowboat for competition purpose and it costs something like 15,000 euros!

Afternoon: Billy had Storm and I do our two remaining stamina test for our Divemaster course. The first one was tired diver tow for 100 meters. I thought it’d be a breeze but I was dead wrong. By the end of the two, I was breathing so hard and I ended up ditching my regular and gasping for air like crazy. My achilles were burning!
We rested for a bit and off we went again into the water to do our 800m snorkle and fin swim. During the first 100m of my first attempt, I drank so much salt water before finally deciding that something was off with my snorkle. I abandoned the attempt and swam back to tell Billy. Good thing I did that cos I was planning to tough it out the whole 800m but my chest ended up hurting so much from all the sea water drinking :\
So with my snorkle changed, I gave it another go. I made it through this time, definitely nowhere close to passing with flying colour, but I passed nonetheless (Billy would have loved that I do it in 16 minutes, I did it in 23 mins, haha)

Night: Charli’s last night on Vela Luka before she’s flying back to England. We all met up at Alfa for a goodbye dinner. Here are some photos (taken by pretty much everybody. I think I should start passing my camera around for people to just snap random photos):

At dinner, Tihanna told us about this outdoor concert with some Croatian bands happening in a football field. We all decided to go. I was lucky and was able to catch a motorbike ride with Attila, a Hungarian guest diver who had been diving with us for a few days. Attila rode the bike all the way from Hungary to Croatia! Quite a way to travel :] Made me wish I could do it. I could have totally pulled a “Motorcycle Diary” like Che in South America.

Here are some pics from the show. The main band is The Beat Fleet. I ended up leaving at 1:30am.. Again, was lucky to catch a ride in Tihana’s car. Saved me some half hour walking back to the staff house. All and all, it was a fun day.

Croatian phrase of the day:

Možete li me probuditi u_? = Can you wake me up at_?