SCUBA

Jake already told you at www.lessthanme.com about what we did on Saturday so I will tell you about our adventures on Sunday...

Well, we finally did it! We had our first SCUBA diving class last Sunday. It was absolutely amazing!! We went to bed on Saturday night around 9:30 so we would get a good night sleep before hand. We had to be at Maui Dream Dive Shop at 7am so we could get our gear fitted up and since we were going to have other people in our class we all met there so we could ride out to the water together. I was expecting to do pool dives first since that is what the book kept taking about, but apparently here they don’t require that so off we were to the beach for our first dive.

We had review time sitting on the grass for about 30 minutes then we all got geared up. Let me tell you…that stuff is unbelievably heavy. Once we all got the stuff on we had to walk about 30 yards to the water. That was the hardest walk I have ever done. Once we got in the water though I couldn’t even tell I had anything on. We put our mask and fins on and put the regulator in our mouths and went down. It freaked me out right when I put my face underwater and exhaled. For some reason I wasn’t expecting to have bubbles around my face, I don’t know where else the air would go but I didn’t expect that. Once I realized that it was normal I was ok.

We all went down to the bottom and did a few exercises like clearing your mask, taking your regulator out and putting it back in and clearing it…things like that. Once we all did them successfully we got to start swimming around. We got to see Puffer Fish, Eels, a whole bunch of other fish that I don’t know the names of. But the best thing we saw down there in my opinion was gigantic turtles. The biggest one we saw was roughly 4-5 feet from head to tail. We got about 5 feet from it. At least that is how far it looked from me which means it was probably more like 6 or 7 feet from me. Our deepest point was 37' and we were underwater for 73 minutes. It didn’t feel that long. The instructor had us guess how long we were down for and I was guessing longer then I actually thought and my guess was 60 minutes.

After that we went back up to shore and had to walk back up to where we started and take off our gear. That walk was actually worse then the walk down and my back was killing me so Jake grabbed the bottom of my tank and took most of the weight of it into his hands which was a tremendous help. We then went back down into the water and had to swim without stopping 200 yards. I really wish we had done that before the dive because I was already totally exhausted. Well, believe it or not…I did it. Not only did I do that, we had to float or tread water for 10 minutes after that. The waves were coming and the wind was blowing so floating wasn’t as easy as it sounded. So I went back and forth between floating and treading water. When it was all over I felt like I had just accomplished something that I never would have imagined being able to do, especially after diving for over and hour.

Our next class is on Saturday. We will be doing 2 dives in the morning and class in the afternoon then on Sunday we will be diving all day. I am really looking forward to it! I can’t wait till I learn to take underwater pictures! That will be amazing!