Masters of Diving

And just like that, it was done.

Me and Aziz, the lead-singer of the local Malay band that played on the island sat on the bottom buddy breathing and struggling to get all of our tanks and gear in place while the instructors did their very best to mess up every single detail of our gear. Luckily both me and Aziz are pretty chilled out, so within 45 grueling minutes we managed to get all our gear switched and put in place properly. A fist bump later we head up and boom; we are dive masters.

It's been an incredible couple of months here in Borneo and I feel spoiled rotten to the core for being able to do this. But above all I feel very, very grateful.

And as for my app, I've managed to get every functionality I needed in order to release it on the app store working as I needed it to. So I'd say another month before I can really feel confident enough that Apple won't outright reject me.

It's gonna be so nice to finally get home and see my family, my girlfriend and my cozy room...

Särklass

Getting pretty close to finishing my DMT at this point. I've demonstrated the skills, I've shadowed dives, assisted courses, carried snot loads of tanks and today I've carried them strapped to a little malaysian man underwater.

It was pretty cooky, this huge group of malay accountants had all decided that they wanted to discover scuba diving for the weekend and opted for scuba junkie. So we were basically 15 people underwater, instructors, DMT's hanging on for dear life to these little malay accountants who were just so excited they were all jittery and kicking up sand all over the place. Some were like torpedoes and you just had to basically sit on the tanks and ride them, some were just frozen in the water and you had to carry them.

Good times, but it seriously looked like an underwater school class of special people.

Hamjacked

We got our Hammock stolen about a week ago, it sucked. We were just going out into the field to sleep and lo and behold; the coconut trees were empty save for some strings they left dangling. I wonder what they were gonna do with a hammock without strings to tie it up.

But hey, what does one expect when one sets up a 100$ hammock on an island that's basically a third world country. I'm just happy I got so many nights out of it, it saved me about four times as much money as I spent on the damn thing. Oh, and my back just got A LOT happier from me sleeping on the mainland in a nice air conditioned dorm.

I said goodbye to the Nish-Fish a couple of nights after the hammock incident as she went back to Sweden to apply for a music school. I miss her, but it's also been good being alone for a while. I think couples who travel together all the time sometimes get too caught up in being with each other and don't give themselves the space they need to truly be able to take in the experiences of travel.

Speaking of travel a ship showed up on the island, a fucking crazy, beautiful, high-tech, diving, hippie vessel which was basically like standing on a slice of heaven when you got on board. We had a party on board that I can honestly say was the high-point of this whole trip. Basking in the sunset until night came and the moon rose over Mabul. I climbed 10 meters up the mast and jumped into the ocean, smacking my ass on the surface like the hand of an angry god. Insanely enough they needed crew, but they were the type of ship that charged a fee for being on board á 850€ per month. Which to be fair isn't an insane amount of money, but I decided against it despite Nishra pleading for me to join her in the ultimate realization of her dream to become a pirate.
Why? Because this year they're gonna spend 6 months in the west coast of Thailand, and next year they'll be sailing across the Pacific via New Zealand and Micronesia to Easter Island. I don't know about you, but as far as diving goes, it sounds like a bit more fun that old "BengBeng"-land and like something I can actually see myself saving up money for..

So what else? I'm too busy helping out on courses and shadowing other dive masters for me to be able to squeeze any programming in there. It's been a bit of a standstill also as far as my progress has gone, I've got to figure out a way to make an array that can be accessed by the whole app, not just one view.

So I've been pondering how to do that today as I learned to tie three new knots: Bowline, Half Hitch and Sheep End. It's been an awesome day, sunny and warm. At one point under water as we were waiting for the ridiculously large DMT group to finish showing off their knot tying skills Juan(another DMT) and I were picking up baby hermit crabs and playing with them on our hands.