called and it was time for us to make our way back to the boat and get ready for our dive. I had already said to Rob that I didn’t want to do the dive but hadn’t really made up my mind, so I guess I just thought well its only 30 minute maximum, you can stand that, and then you’ll never have to do it again!!! Without really realised what was going on, I had a tank on my back and was being prepared for the dive, I thought I can’t really back out now, so in for a penny and all of that! I got into the water and was absolutely petrified, I hung onto the back of the boat rope and if I was religious I would have prayed!!! I was dreading it, I was breathing faster than I think I have ever breathed in my life and just wished it was all over. There were 4 of us in our group and thankfully there was another girl who I guessed was feeling pretty similar to me. Rob looked comfortable with it, me and the other 2 girls no so. The instructor was also great, he obviously knew we were petrified and after our

initial acclimatising came over gripped all of our arms before starting to swim off. I felt a lot happier hanging on to him and after around 5 minutes started to calm down and have a look around! The water was fairly murky due to all of the rain but it was still amazing to see what lived down there. We saw sharks, nothing of the scale of Jaws, a mantra ray that was lay on the bottom covered in sand, loads of different coloured little fish, some alarmingly large ones and loads of different coloured coral. It definitely was another world and I was finally starting to overcome my fears and enjoy it. We also got to kneel on the bottom which was really hard, me and another girl kept floating up, but the instructor came over to each of us with some weird sea creature, I think it was a sea cucumber! Whatever it was, it was strange and it felt really odd. After this it wasn’t long before we started heading back to the surface, we had to keep holding our noses and blowing to help our ears rebalance, then hey ho it