SCUBA

Today I went SCUBA diving!

Well 4 days ago mom and I rented a motor bike and I drove down town and we saw a lot of signs saying X-DIVE, RAINBOW DIVERS and others. These are all dive shops. We looked in to doing that and the next day we went to the RAINBOW DIVERS shop and talked to the guy at the front desk about SCUBA. He said 10 is the perfect age and I could take a corse called B-C-D. It is pretty much Day #1 for 2 hours learn and use the equipment at a pool at a hotel, then day #2 go out to two dive spots and go  SCUBA diving. We decided to do that and for mom to do the same but a snorkeling corse.

The first day I got up at 8:00 and got to the hotel by 9:00. The pool is nice and big and is warm. We saw the car pull up and the tanks get trucked out of the back and new it was them.   We talked about the masks and tanks then started learning to clear a mask under water, retrieve your fin and stuff like that. After learning everything we just went to the deep end and swam around to end our session.

Day 2 we got up at 7:00 and (in a very tired fashion) got picked up by the bus to go to the boat. (I am never going to be able to wake up at 6:00 every morning to get the school bus.) We got to the boat and met every one and got into groups. Every 4 or less people got a pro diver. After that we started going to our 1st spot to dive. After 1 hour we got to the dive spot and got our suites on and jumped in--the water was really warm! We grabbed on to the anchor line and started to drift down. The bottom was sand and I hit it trying not to disturb the coral. We were down there for 1 hour using 200 bar air. There were crabs, fish, nudibranches (big word for slugs) and more. Some great coral was there too. Sea fans and brain cora are my favorite. After an hour we went up and broke the surface. Mom said she could see a lot too (even though the SCUBA divers went down 30 ft to the coral.) That dive was great!!

The 2nd dive was a bit low visibility but ok. We did the same but when we got to 15 feet my ears wouldn't pop so I had to go to 7 feet then have my ears pop and come back down. The rest was the same  but with more nudibranches and trash. The first dive was far better.

When I got back to the boat I was so tired and I fell asleep for 2 hours until we got to the dock. In the pictures you can see me with a snorkel--it is because on the surface we try not to use tank air and if a wave comes you don't drink it.







Over all I had a good SCUBA experience and you should try it some time--or again.  :) JM