The diving was pretty incredible. Not crowded like a lot of the Jeju dives, but with more hard corals and less soft. I can't be thankful enough the I trained with Ralf at Big Blue 33 in Seogwipo. His German attention to detail, patience and persistence really gave me a lot of confidence in my diving abilities. Our dive guide in Port Barton was a little different. She took Butler and myself (both Advanced divers) into an open barge wreck to explore, which was awesome in addition to a few other interesting spots. There were two very interesting situations that we encountered under our leader's 'guidance'. The first came when Doris was giving a deep diving class for two of our fellow divers. Having completed this, Butler and I basically were along to explore and help the divers if there were any problems. Well, we encountered problems within the first 5 meters. John-Michael could not equalize properly, so while Brooke and Dorris continued the lesson, we took JM up a meter or two so he could adjust and then proceed downward slowly. By the time we finished our turtle-paced decent to 30m, Brooke had already developed signs of 'nitrogen narcosis' and was claustrophobic and overly anxious. (I failed to mention that on this day the water was rather rough and visibility was probably around 10m. Not optimal by any means.) Brooke was taken back the the surface, and JM was given some tests underwater. After he completed 5-6 he too had to be taken to the surface. At this time Doris signaled to Butler and me to take our own unguided underwater tour until we had 70 bar left, and then ascend. Luckily Butler had a dive computer and we were both pretty solid at underwater navigation. We followed the edge of a reef at 30m looking down into the 50m depths below us for 20 minutes or so, found our way back to the anchor line and went back topside. It could have been a really scary situation, but we handled it really well with no hitches. I dare say Ralf himself may have been proud. Maybe. The other dive was a shallower underwater tour, mostly above 20m. Doris took the two students in one direction and told Michael and me to explore with no real directions. We took advantage of this and went pretty much wherever we wanted. Once again we had a dive computer and kept our depths pretty consistent. Unfortunately we did get 'lost'. We were in a secluded bay, so there weren't too many dangers, but periodically Michael would have to surface to get a look at the boat and figure out which direction we should take to get back. We made it back to the boat without and problems, but apparently Butler surfaced at one point and the boat was a speck on the horizon. Our air consumption was so good we even had time to grab a camera and take some pictures when we got back to the boat.
On a separate day we all took a trip to a near by waterfall and jumped into the refreshing water with a local kid that followed us. All-in-all a pretty nice couple of days.