First Week at the Shop

This past week has been a whirlwind of settling into the new place, working, learning, reading, diving, studying, cooking and sleeping. We started work at the dive shop last Monday. Our first day involved meeting everyone - the owner Glennis and her husband David (who runs the MCSS program), the instructors Tony and Sabrina, the other divemasters (DMs) Michael and Yannick, the skippers Andrew and Mervin and the two assistants Hera and Jeaneve (pretty sure I just butchered the spelling of both of their names. Sorry guys). Glennis and David are originally from the UK but have lived here in Seychelles for over 30 years running the dive shop. Everyone else that works at the shop is Seychellois.
The first couple days were spent learning the ins and outs at the shop - cleaning and sweeping up in the morning, setting all the tanks and gear out for the clients, going over the knowledge reviews in our DM books and going out on dives to observe how the DMs run their dives and learning the sites, since a handful of them are new to us. By day 3 we were leading small groups on our own, usually following one of the instructors or other DMs and their small groups. But by the end of the week we were sent off on our own leading small groups of no more than 4 people. Pretty awesome! I've had some pretty incredible dives - at Grouper Point we had the best visibility I've ever seen here (over 20 meters, at least) and saw a 2 meter long white tip reef shark, a group of eagle rays, a group of squid, and the usual gorgeous fish swimming around. The visibility dropped later in the week, but still had really nice dives and I even saw two octopus and two hawksbill turtles at that same sight yesterday. The shop has 3 dives per day and on busy days I've been on all 3, other days I spent most of the day in the shop helping out and talking to clients, which is quite fun since they come in from all over the world. I had my 100th dive this week - which is pretty exciting considering I came here 3 months ago with only 4 dives under my weight belt (dive joke, har har.). I didn't have any photos to document it though, as I was out with a client and taking photos just ain't appropriate (yet). Instead I've created these handy maps that show the bay from our balcony and the approximately location of some of the dive sites (in red) and our shop and other stuff (in black). Also below is a map of Mahe to show where the GVI base is and where I am now. Nerd alert, I know. What can I say, I like maps - clearly an inherited trait from my mom.