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Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Week 4 in Pez Maya-Advance open water certification, monitoring and community work start! Too much fun!

With a month behind us now we are all functioning very smoothly at Pez Maya. We
all are accustomed to our duties, racing to compress tanks and are all a lot stronger and
pushing the boats better than ever!

This week all of our AOW or advanced open water course participants finished off their
certification! We all navigated, became even better naturalists, familiarized ourselves
with boat terminology, mastered our buoyancy and of course went down to 100ft/
30m! The deep dive was definitely my favorite of the five adventure dives. Between
watching a water bottle compress as we descended, cracking an egg underwater and
even looking at the color change of a tomato we all had loads of fun at depth.

Now that everyone is qualified we have officially started monitoring!!! Very exciting!
Well we started doing practice monitoring, laying tape measures, and practicing
swimming upside down while following the line and writing. It’s tricky but lots of fun.

The non diving volunteer work this week consisted of 3 volunteers going to the Mayan
village again, and then 4 different volunteers going to Punta Allen. Once we arrived
in the small Mexican village of Punta Allen after a long 2h bumpy ride we taught
English in the primary and secondary schools. We had a lot of fun singing songs about
fruit, teaching the months of the year and of course playing some duck duck goose,
or variations like Tshirt Tshirt Shorts. Then after a very good lunch at an at home
restaurant we helped with the recycling program by crushing a bunch of plastic bottles.
It was a long day but very rewarding after receiving many Gracias, and hugs.

With only one week left for some and others nearing their half way point, we are all
realizing how amazing this place is and how much we will miss it when we leave. I
still have one more week of diving and marine conservation work though! And I am
looking forward to every minute.
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