Family Visits - Dua

Robbie the Scuba Instructor – by his Dad, Rob

Robbie not only loves diving and spends as much time doing that as possible, but immediately stepped into his instructor's role and began our lessons on our first full day on Gili T, at a beautiful dive shop about three doors up the road from our hotel. It is immediately evident that Robbie grew up in a family with many teachers. With no formal teacher training, he easily managed to impress his dad as we began our pool work. While Mom and Dad are Open Water and Advanced Open Water certified we have not dived for about 25 years, so Robbie had to run us through the refresher course while also doing Liza's complete Open Water certification. He put us through all the paces right by the book with thorough explanations and demonstrations. We were all thrilled when we reached Liza's first open water dive and we could all don our gear and head for the ocean.

While cruising around underwater with the colorful fish, sea turtles and beautiful corals, it is easy to see why Robbie can tolerate his spartan existence in this boiling heat. It is way too much fun. With his experience, he has certainly developed an eye for spotting many beautiful things that I would have easily missed had he not been pointing them out. One memorable occasion in particular bears sharing here.

On Christmas Day there was no diving. No boats were operating on the holiday. Not being able to stay away from the water, we elected to make a snorkeling expedition. After navigating our way over the dead coral in the shallows near the shore we reached an area of underwater life at the top of the drop-off. After a while of enjoying the sites we hear Robbie yelling through his snorkel “SHARK! SHARK!” while pointing and swimming at top speed - no, not away from the direction he was pointing. He had me swimming after him, marveling at a beautiful black tip reef shark. I had always thought that people went the other direction at the sound of that word, but found myself understanding his enthusiasm.