Certified Open Water diver JVZ….

That’s right, you heard me, I have completed! my open water certification course and am now a registered DIVER!

Basically how it goes is I read this horrifically cheesy and boring book about equiptment and rules and depths and blah blah blah but I actually read it all and paid attention don’t worry because….. then I had a TEST to take regarding all this stuff! So I passed that last weekend with flying colors, and moved on, with a fellow intern Kate, to the diving portion of training.

Beginning on Thursday we did the Confined Dive, which was actually in the ocean but it was close enough in to shore that we could basically stand up if necesary. I was pretty freaked out at first; it is just so unnatural to be breathing underwater and all the pressure and water around your head and every breath sounds loud like Darth Vador and all the bubbles going up with every breath out…. anyways, it was good cause first we just went under and breathed for maybe a couple minutes just to see that it is all ok, and then we came just back to the surface to show my brain that it’s all ok. So then we went back under and completed a bunch of “skills”… basically debriefing for any emergency situation that could happen. Some are pretty easy, like take the regulator (thing you breath out of) out of your mouth and then put it back in. The hardest for me was to take my mask off and then put it back on… then you have to clear your mask by breathing air into it out your nose. I was a little scared to do it in the first place sitting on the seabottom in front of our teacher Marieke (more about her later) and hearing my crazy loud breaths and then close my eyes and take away the last tie I have to the “normal” world… my ability to see. So I was in a totally foriegn environment breathing in air through this wierd pipe and feeling the water pressure pushing bubbles of water up my nose, unable to see, fumbling with my mask but not really even caring about my mask anymore because I don’t trust myself to be here I don’t know where I am or what I’m doing or why and all I wanted was to be back at the surface. So good thing anyways that I was hardly down at all, and I am proud of I had the presence of mind to signal to Marieke that I wanted to go up and then I started swimming and basically immediately broke the surface flailing my arms and legs and trying to get up mask and regulator in and stay afloat at the same time and of course, like they said in the book is the classic sign of a “distressed diver” I totally didn’t think at all to inflate my BCD… which is what would make me float and make everything ok. So Marieke asked what went wrong and told me to just trust her and trust myself and trust the equiptment, take my time, think it through, make it work. I went back down and went immediately back where I had been and this time I concentrated just on my breathing, and on slow deliberate movements breath out through your nose or plug it if necessary. It took us nearly two hours to finish all the exercise, but we did them all!

Yesterday was our first “real” dive, although it was a really shallow one anyways. I had a lot of trouble equalizing my ears, it it is just so wierd to feel all that pressure all around and the wierdness of no gravity… basically I felt uncomfortable and awkward and not really having fun for either of yesterday’s two short dives, although I was able by the end to get outside my own brain for long enough to realize how awesome it is to get a whole new world of creatures and beautiful plants and wierd wierd things I don’t even know what anything is not even if it is plant or animal often and that is awesome and incredible!

This morning to be honest I woke up kinda resenting that I was going to be diving again already. I felt in my body and mind that I could do with a little more time to process, plus I was just tierd in that brain/body way that only really happens I think when you go outside your comfort zone… actually it hasn’t happened to me in a long time come to think of it! Anyhow, I had already agreed, so we got down to the dive center 8 AM and put all our equiptment together and met these two other guys who were going down with us and the whole time I was dragging my heels a bit and then I was not paying full attention to the breifing and messed up a bit with equiptment and getting ready to get off the boat; basically not my morning. Beginning down the line I was freaking out cause my ears weren’t equalizing and it HURTS and Kate and Marieke were way down there and I felt bad I was slowing them up so much…. finally Marieke came back up to me and showed me to just keep creeping down the rope and equalizing every few inches so that at least I kept moving, and I finally made it down. First real dive site…. amazing corals and baby turtles starting to feel comfortable underwater moving more gracefully and observing ALL of this action, drama, a whole ecosystem a whole world that has always been down there but I’ve never had access to before or really even known about besides in some very theoretical way. Amazing.