How long have I been scuba diving?

I met my husband over 13 years ago and he was an avid scuba diver. He claimed to have over 1600 hours of dive time logged. That didn’t even include the times that he didn’t write down his dives. I was very excited to learn to dive. He was going to teach me, but he wanted to teach my Precious first. It was something he had been raising his daughter to learn and was excited to teach her. I understood and agreed.

When Precious was about 10 years old, he started teaching her to snorkel. They looked so cute in their wet suits swimming out to seal rock. She came back with so many stories about what she saw. Soon, she decided to tackle surfing. She was pretty good at it. Then came the teenage years and she began to dread the effects of salt water on her curly hair. It made her hair frizz and she hated it! So, she was effectively done with water sports.

I decided it was time that I learn to scuba dive, but I was nervous about my sight. We talked about how I could buy prescription goggles, but I worried what I would do if they were knocked off while I was diving. How would I find them since I couldn’t see anything without glasses? Then he decided to buy me laser surgery.

I was so nervous. I decided to go with the company his brother had gone with. The surgery had been so successful that I felt comfortable with them. It was scary. I kind of freaked out on the second eye and the results were not as good as it could have been, but still effective.

I was so excited to be able to look around and see a world without a fuzzy haze on it. I’d been wearing glasses since I was 12. Now it was April of 2005, Spring Break, 32 years old and I couldn’t wait to go diving! I love the water and thought scuba diving would be the best experience in the world.

My husband is not the most patient man and I was very nervous that if I freaked out at all while he was trying to teach me, I’d be done. He would never take me again. So I signed up at Sport Chalet and took the course there. It turned out that it was a good idea, because I did kind of freak out a little, just in the pool course. I was surprised because I have always loved being underwater, as deep as I could get. I’d open my eyes and everything. But this was somehow different, obviously, with a tank strapped to my back and actually trying to breathe and not hold my breath.

We were scheduled to do our beach dive first, but it was rained out. It was November 2005 and we had to reschedule that dive. The second dive was our trip to the island. I had rented and borrowed gear and most of it didn’t fit very well. It was a boat dive. I was looking forward to this since we would be doing most, if not all, of our diving off of our boat.

We geared up as the boat got closer to the island. I made sure I ate one more thing before I jumped in. Found my buddy and we checked each other’s gear. Spit in the mask, rubbed it around on the glass to keep the mask from fogging up and stepped off the platform.

The water was so cold. However, it didn’t take very long for me to adjust to the temperature. There was no guide line to descend. We were all on our own. As I sunk under the water, a mild sense of panic came, but I was brave and overcame quickly. The visibility was 40 feet, which is very unusual. I could see the bottom and everything was good. I have found over time that the only thing that makes diving scary for me is not being able to orient myself to any visual thing.

The swim was so calming. I think it is the most calming experience that I have ever had. Even though my gear was giving me trouble, it just felt so amazing to be under the water, feeling it glide over my “skin”. My feet kept floating away. Precious’ fins were too big for me.

We swam through the kelp and a couple of times, my partner got stuck. He was able to get himself free quickly though. There were Garibaldi and Sheepshead fish, starfish, and snails like the ones in our fish tank, only bigger. I was hooked. I had to do this again!

We dove for about an hour and then it was time to resurface. I ascended hesitantly, yet eager to tell my husband about my dive. It was awesome! I couldn’t wait for the next dive.

The next weekend I woke up early to get to the beach dive. My husband had offered to just drop me off from the boat, but I didn’t want to do it that way. The surf wasn’t bad at all, barely any. I quickly discovered that the button on my BC wasn’t working. The BC is the vest that you fill up with air to help you float in the water. I was going to have to manually inflate my vest throughout the dive. I could do this…

We all walked in and then floated to put our fins on. We swam out a ways to where we were going to drop. My partner had somehow lost one of his weight bags on the beach and couldn’t descend. Luckily, the instructor had extra weights in the buoy.

That settled, it was time to drop down. We followed a guideline to the sandy bottom. The visibility was 40+ feet again! I was a lucky girl. The visibility is never that good there. At the bottom, more drills. We had to take off the BC and put it back on while at the bottom of the ocean. Then we went to swim away.

The sensation of being weightless and swimming under the ocean is still one of my most favorite things in the world. This dive, I had much more control of my buoyancy and didn’t float away quite so often. I feel like I had more control of the BC because I was manually inflating it. We swam through a little cave and along a cliff wall. Schools of tiny fish swam away from us. All kinds of kelp and algae were growing on the rocks. Sea urchin stuck up from the crevices.

Then, yet again, the dive was over before I was ready. We all did an air pressure check and I still had almost 1000 lbs of air left. Lucky for me! One of the instructors swam back with me under water while everyone else surfaced and had to swim back on top. By the time I got to the top of the stairs, most everyone else was already out of their wetsuits. The instructor looked at me funny, though. He laughed as he told me he was discussing whether or not they could find my gills.

My excuse was that I had a steel tank and had more air than everyone else. He said that wasn’t it. I still should’ve used more air than I did. I guess my dad was right all these years. Maybe I am part fish.