Damo chilling out on his surface interval at White Island
On the 3/4th October we headed down south for one of our special trips, the first ever time the diploma course had been taken out to White Island. We had all heard amazing things about previous trips Auckland Scuba had run to White Island so we were all super excited. We were going to dive this active volcano for our PADI Deep Instructor Training, during the deep training we had to prepare 2 skills. I had comparing depth gauges at depth and the famous narcosis test. We headed out to the island from Whakatane which took about an hour, we were treated to this volcano spewing sulphur high into the air, the waves crashing on the side of the boat and the gulls swarming around bait balls… What an epic way to start the day!!!! We got to the dive site, conducted our briefings and descended onto our fist dive site “Club Rock”. Instantly we were engulfed in blue mau mau, pink mau mau and lots of massive silver fish. The fish life was crazy at White Island, we reached the sandy bottom at around 26m with at least 15m visibility and began our skills, the first one went off without a hitch, everyone recorded their depths using gauges and computers then I set my team off with their narcosis test… They were definitely slower than at the surface and they knew it. Finishing up the test we laughed and headed off on the dive where we found scorpionfish, volcanic vents and even had some seals swim down to see us. The second dive was just as good as the first, this time we seen heaps of cray fish and pack horses but they eluded us. Coming up after this dive we were right in the bay next to the volcanic vent. What an awesome sight!!! All in all our first day at white island was amazing. Thanks to Auckland Scuba for doing this White Island trip with us for our PADI Deep Specialty Instructor Training 🙂
– Damian Hayne
Check out the video of our trip on our YouTube channel: