For most gap-year adventurers or career gappers, as well as for a huge variety of other keen travellers, getting a deep sea diving proficiency qualification is a must. The most common of these is the Open Water level from PADI, which more than 200,000 people complete every year.
Top of most young divers’ lists is still Ko Tao in Thailand, but overcrowding and a lapse in standards has caused the discerning traveller to look elsewhere. More and more of them are heading to the Perhentian Islands, just across the Thai-Malay border.
Malaysia is the fastest growing dive market in the world, and it’s not difficult to see why. The Perentians are a cut above other Thai and Malaysian islands in terms of beauty, dive locations and dive quality. Dives are a mite more expensive than, say, Ko Tao, but the group sizes are halved (a massive bonus for learners) and there are more safeguards in place to protect inexperienced divers.
One school in particular – Quiver – has been getting a reputation among travellers for being great value, great fun and very professional. The owner Kin told me: “We run the place European, not like South East Asian. It’s all about service – if people complain we make sure they go away happy. We want Quiver divers to be the best divers out there.” To help fulfil this ambition Kin throws in a free advanced dive with every PADI Open Water completed, which can count towards the students’ advanced course.
I went along to renew my skills with Jamie, while he did his Open Water. I hadn’t been diving for a good 8 years and was rusty in the extreme. J, on the other hand, took to it like a tropical fish to water, flapping his fins and inflating his BCD as if he was born to it.
Our first minutes underwater gave us a rude shock as a black-banded sea snake came out of nowhere – plunging itself headlong between Jamie and his buddy. They’re deadly poisonous and a bite means death within seconds, but fortunately they can only bite you on the webbing between your fingers (due to the width of their jaws) and we kept our fists tightly clenched until it swam away.
Renewing my diving after so long was strange. I remembered much of the technique and enjoyed the feeling of being in a blue room again, where the surface is the shining ceiling and the coral and rocks are strange chairs, like in a Dali painting or something. But, having experienced such amazing snorkelling in Pulau Weh and other places in the last 8 years, I found myself non-plussed by the idea of putting on so much equipment, looking like a rubber-covered dork, and risking life and limb through nitrogen exposure just to get a better look at some fish. Not to mention that snorkelling is cheaper and needs less excessive preperation.
Much as I enjoyed renewing my skills so I know that diving with Jamie (who’s now obsessed) is an option, it did make me wonder. Of the thousands of people who complete their PADI OW on their gap years, like I did, I wonder how many people actually use them again, and how many, when faced with lugging 30KG of equipment into the sea, simply choose to slip on a snorkel, smile and splash away.
It’s a myth about sea snakes not being able to bite wide, probably put about by an over-comforting PADI instructor. They are perfectly capable of dinging you, even on the thigh. But being placid creatures they rarely do; even – so it turned out – when you stroke one.