Day 89 Chios

Mat: I have to admit I was asleep by 21:00 last night, after getting up super early the day before. I was really refreshed when I woke up this morning, which was good because I went scuba diving! I really loved our last dive in Dubrovnik in June, and Chios has a reputation as one of the better islands for scuba diving in Greece. Kat's decided that diving isn't for her. I made contact with a lovely instructor called Kostas and the two of us went out this morning. I told him about my limited diving experience and how I wanted to go slowly, and he said that we should always dive slowly. Already my kind of guy. We drove up to a site 20 minutes north of Chios town, by a tiny church on the water's edge, the chapel of Saint Isidore of Sykiada. We spent half an hour on the bottom practising buoyancy, then went to explore the sea. I was fine most of the way until we got deeper and out from the coast, and I started feeling like I couldn't breathe. Of course, I could breathe fine. But as the seabed dropped away to black below us, from 11m down, I panicked, and we both surfaced for a few minutes. I calmed down, and we went down again, a bit shallower. We saw an octopus, sea urchins, anemones, a broken 500-year-old amphora and so many fish. It was just stunning, and everything I wanted out of a dive. He said that everybody panics. He said that my reaction, to ask to surface together and slowly, was really good - a lot of people just go up on their own and suddenly, without any warning.