Ok. It is a long story how I ended up diving so soon after Perhentian. It was polling day weekend (5-7 May) but none of us needed to vote (sigh... 32 years... and I've never voted once) so it was a welcomed break from work.

Part of it had to do with ADEX. I bought a new underwater camera to replace my six year old Olympus C3040Z and its PT10 case. It has served me well but alas, I had to keep up with the times. I had bought my Canon S2 IS for this purpose but Canon angered the diving community by refusing to release an underwater case for it :( Now that the S3 IS has come out, I'm giving up on Canon entirely. Anyway, this was the first dive with my new, more compact, Olympus SP320 and its PT030 casing. I'm impressed on the whole. The pics were qualitatively better than the 3040... and with much less post-dive editing. The preprogrammed underwater modes do work although they weren't perfect but hey, it was part of a $699 package that included the camera, u/w case, 512mb XD card and a wet bag. Who am I to resist a good deal? :)

Another part had to do with a few colleagues who had oringally wanted to set up our own dive trip. Audris was itching to try out her new ADEX bought BCD, regs and other gear. Pi Hsien, Sharon and Krysania just wanted to take in some compressed air. To cut a long story short, only Audris and I could make it. Without enough people to form our own dive trip, we joined Apache divers for their trip to Aur.

So here we are. Four hours across Johore state to Mersing by minibus and another fours hours on our boat, the Island Explorer later, we were at Adventure Bay Resort, Pulau Aur.