During the previous year, before getting to Thailand we traveled through Malaysia. One of our stops had been on the beautiful Perentian islands in the north east of the country, these too are dive islands, but the whole time we were there neither of us had dived. I did however meet someone very special there. We had met before whilst living in Cardiff, shortly before leaving on this trip. Her name was Sara.

Sara was 23 and traveling around the world on a break after studying for many years in the field of zoology.

We became partners but spending this time apart whilst I messed about with diving was really hard, especially as we had had a complicated past over the last year. But that’s another story!

Sara and I had decided to travel together to new Zealand and on through the south pacific to Fiji and the Cook Islands, where I would continue to dive as and when I could, for money or fun, but as we were spending all our time together the opportunity to dive got less and less, as did our funding.

We spent roughly nine months or so traveling on this route until it was time to go home and repair the damage we had done to our bank accounts, which also meant a hold on the diving scene. I don’t like the cold as I mentioned in the beginning and there are very few recreational facilities in the u.k. especially in south west Wales.

I took a normal 9-5 job in a hospital and worked there until I had enough money to go to Mexico to take part in an IDC at Aqua World, Cancun. I hadn’t dived in a long time and by now I was getting rusty, but it was still pretty fresh in my mind so I jumped right in.

The work for the IDC was tough. I don’t care what anyone says, learning physics again after being out of school for 5-6 years is not easy, but the hardest thing of all was being apart from Sara for all this time.

If it had only been for the time it took to do the IDC and go home again it would have not been so hard but it takes a long time to save enough money to get to the Americas, so, as I was there, I would try and make the most of it.

After I had passed my IDC with flying colours, I was planning on heading to yet another small group of dive islands, but this time in the Caribbean.