Location: Cocos (Keeling) Island
Does this taste funny to you?
Admittedly I’m still awaiting the breakthrough of my career as a globetrotting comedian to the masses.
To quote a wise old sage: Cocos Keeling is heaps cool. At lunch today, we counted 12 sharks loitering around the stern and now leaving their apparent lack of direction in life for them to deal with. However, you look at it, that’s a lot of sharks. What’s more, as the rescuers were getting out of the water this afternoon (more on that later), a pod of dolphins mosied on by, and I wouldn’t even say this is an exceptional day. The amount of large and interesting (and perhaps unnerving to some audiences) things that live here is frankly incredible. And as if that wasn’t enough, to put this into context, you have to look at where we are: here we have a collection of 27 islands totaling a land area of 14 square kilometers with the highest point above sea level in the entire archipelago looming overall but the loftiest palm trees at a whopping 5m. We’re nearly 1000 miles from the nearest continental landmass and 500 miles from the nearest island with a population of over 2000. Basically, we’re in the middle of the ocean and have this incredible opportunity to experience a snapshot of an area largely out of the range of human influence. Judging by the number of towels on the lifelines and salt in hair, I think we’ve been doing a reasonable job at making the most of it.
We started the day with everyone getting stuck into some practical EFR (emergency first response to anyone not down with the lingo) training as Tina, Alex, and Mimi shed insight and anecdotes on what really is a superset of skills to take away from the program. After pausing for a sumptuous lunch, it was back into it, with rescue divers responding to scenarios such as missing divers underwater and unconscious divers at the surface for most of the afternoon. As heavy as this sounds, rescue is cracking. Out of all the courses, PADI offers it probably ranks among the top few in terms of how much one can grow through its training. What’s more, watching practice responses to panicked divers make for a fantastic spectator sport. While this was going on, the recently qualified advanced open water divers had the option of adventures ashore or going for a fun dive. I was lucky enough to go along with the latter contingent, being treated to manta rays and some pretty inquisitive and somewhat grumpy sharks (they were all pretty small, so, fortunately, it was all impotent angst). Then with some homemade bread and pasta prepared by chef team Aiden, Smash, and Alex, with a special guest appearance from Alan, we rounded off another day in one of the coolest spots I’ve been on Argo.