07/10/13 An Ordinary Day at the Office

Our day to day workplace isn’t like any regular office you would imagine. We get to work in a beautiful office that is surrounded by nature itself which gives us the opportunity to spend most of our day outdoors. But not only do we get to be outdoors but we spend our days diving in the beautiful Indian Ocean which is just a two minute walk away.

To organise a day on base with 32 people there has to be some kind of structure therefore our base manager Kate always draws up a schedule on the blackboard in the kitchen. This is how an ordinary schedule on base looks like:

6:30	Wake up	12:15	Dive C kit up
6:45	Duties	12:30	Lunch
7:00	Breakfast	13:00	Dive C leaves
7:30	Kit up dive A or first lecture	13:30	Mega fauna lecture
7:45	Dive A leaves	14:45	Dive D kit up
8:30	Fish and coral workshop	15:00	Dive D leaves
9:45	Dive B kit up	16:00	Beach volleyball Dive A against Dive B
10:00	Dive B leaves	18:30	Dinner and movie night

Every morning we have different duties that each group has to fulfil before breakfast for example there is making breakfast for 32 people so kitchen, cleaning camp, getting all things from the kit room for the boat and filling the empty tanks with the compressor. Every dive group has to get their dive gear ready before leaving so that there isn’t any delay in between dives and that’s why we kit up 15 minutes before diving. If you’re not on the first dive group you attend a lecture in which you learn more about the ocean and its inhabitants.

 Those people who aren’t on kitchen duty have free time to study, go hiking, snorkelling or just relaxing on base but the kitchen group does have to fulfil their duty and prepare lunch and dinner for everyone so they are quite busy preparing several delicious meals. Each Thursday there is a lot to do because it’s the weekly BBQ night but everyone that isn’t busy helps prepare for the big feast.

In between dives there are also often scheduled activities like beach volleyball, snorkelling in our bay and also to improve the new volunteers baking skills a bread baking lesson which results in happy faces which can also end in being covered with flour.

Dinner might be early but here in the Seychelles night falls rather early at 18:15 you can’t really imagine how dark it gets without any city lights around. After dinner weekly themes are scheduled like for example movie night were we can vote on a available movie and pub quiz where group rivalry can tend to go overboard which always ends in laughter.

After such a strenuous but fulfilling and fun day everybody on base goes to bed quite early zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz good night see you tomorrow guys.

07/10/13 An Ordinary Day at the Office