Coral Relief

So for everyone out there who has ever considered the possibility of going for a dive, here’s how it began for me.

In the summer of 2013, I was a freshly minted high school graduate from Delhi. My mother decided to take my brother and I on a holiday to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. We stayed at the Barefoot scuba resort near Beach no.7 on Havelock. Having painstakingly completed the online eLearning quizzes we were able to start our Open Water Diver course the very next day.
* Side note, it takes a while to reach the Andamans. Flights land in Port Blair and then you have to take a ferry to Havelock (now Swaraj Raj).
I will continue to call it Havelock as I like the name better.

That was the first time I fell in love with a place, although I was too young to appreciate it then. I will write a different post about the beauty of Havelock. Back to the Open Water, we all completed it in the next 4 days and had some shore and some boat dives. I honestly don’t remember how I felt at the time, but I do know I was relatively comfortable through most of it.

But as most good things, it took time for me to make diving a regular part of my life. I went on to complete the Advanced Open water course in Nha Trang, Vietnam in the summer of 2014 but it wasn’t till 2017 that the bug really bit me.

Cut to 2017, May, I find myself having taken a month off and having decided to spend that time on Havelock by myself. This was the first time in my life that I travelled Solo. I cannot explain the magic of doing so, but I will try (again, in another post). That was when I questioned my way of life. By the end of the month, I really did not want to leave, to go back to Delhi. I had literally made plans in my mind to become a dive professional and spend my time on Havelock training others and meeting new people. But I didn’t. I had to come back. Not anyone’s fault, just sometimes things don’t align, and at that moment for my 23 year old self, it wasn’t meant to be.

For that month, I fun dived almost everyday, twice a day. (Fun dives are when certified divers are lead by a local divemaster to go explore the reefs in that area). I completed my Freediving and Underwater Naturalist courses and met some amazing people who I still call friends. There is a community of divers that was made by a few pioneers who started diving on that island and made Dive Centres so that this sport become accessible to Indians, more than 20 years ago. Many young people then followed suit to move to that remote island and live their lives there as Dive Instructors, Divemasters and Dive staff. I find it to be the hidden gem of India. Although that could be a controversial opinion, seeing as how India would have many more of those. But for whoever is thinking about diving, Andamans and Nicobar Islands is the place to be in India.

If anyone has any questions, thoughts or similar experiences, I would love to hear about it in the comments below!