Falling in love with diving

I suppose each and everyone of us has a list of things to do before we die. In my case, I call it "List of X things I want to do before I retire". The word "retire" in reference to death comes from one of my favourite films of all time "Blade Runner", and to a lesser extent belief in my own immortality. "X" instead of a number because the damn list keeps on growing. Before my walkabout it was a list of twenty things: I ticked off about ten by mid 2004, but then added about twenty more. Then checked off a few more entries and added still more... Now the list contains a hundred entries, and that's only to keep it nice and round. There are still things in the "waiting room" that I just haven't put on it yet. Anyways... already rolled off the topic, back to my list, circa late year 2003 on which scuba diving was the solo adventure sport. Previous to that, I have only tried one other adventure sport: surfing in Hawaii, which was a miserable failure and ended with me almost ripping my nipples off. But, that's another story...

Fast forward to October 2004, Thailand. On my second tour of Bangkok, having visited all the tourist, flower, night and meat markets I walked into an office of Crystal Dive and booked an Open Water course in Koh Tao. Bloody bargain all right. $200 for a ticket to Koh Tao, the course and four days in a beach-side bungalow. Two days later I was on a long bus trip changing onto a puke boat heading to the islands. Long haul travel has its "charms", but it's cheap and gets me to my destination slightly more rested than flying in a plane (which with it's low pressure and sterile air is a nightmare for me). Stepping out of the boat on Mae Head and into the blazing island sun, everyone was immediately accosted by runners from every dive shop on the island. But armed with my course and accommodation vouchers I pushed bravely through the army of tiny Thais until I found one waving Crystal Dive leaflets and making him think he was making a sale, had him carry my backpack for me to the dive shop. After he's disappeared, I checked into my bungalow having scheduled the class to start tomorrow. There was a class starting that afternoon, but quite frankly I was in a mood for a nap and a nice lie on a beach, not a classroom session.

Next day, I begun my education as a diver. Sitting through the classroom session was not too bad, except for watching the mandatory PADI video, which officially sucked (this in fact has proved to be the truth of any and all future PADI videos I had the misfortune of watching). Actually, and no disrespect to PADI which is a wonderful blood sucking organization, its training videos are so incredibly painful to watch, they, along with listening to Backstreet Boys, watching J-Lo star in a movie and eating liver with fava beans, could be used as very successful torture method on spies and terrorists. So couple hours of this lobotomizing video followed by an a question and answer session with the instructor and we had the rest of the day off. We had to wait for the pool session until the next day, and the next morning I finally got the first taste of breathing underwater: in a highly controlled and bleached environment. Still, that was a new experience, a bit strange at first, then quite comforting: like being in a womb... a very sterile, chlorinated, blue womb... with 7 other people... disturbing thought. After finishing all the skills we were ready for our first two open water dives scheduled for the next day.

The next morning on the boat was quite uneventful. We took a shaky ride to our dive site, got briefed by the instructor and geared up. So far, this was just another sport I was trying out, nothing too exciting about it, except that being dressed up in a wetsuit and scuba made for great posterity photos. Soon after jumping into the water, we all gathered round a buoy and begun the descent. The first descent into open water is a very stressful experience for almost everyone. One of the other students in the class didn't make it and decided to cut out. It took the rest of us a good part of five minutes to descend about 6 meters below the surface. I spent my entire time trying to equalize my ears while frantically holding on to the descend line. My entire concentration was being taken up by holding my nose and watching the instructor, in case I was to spiral out of control into the abysmal depths of... 6 meter. To be perfectly honest I did not enjoy this experience at all. Breathing seemed labored and artificial and all I could focus on was the damn rope I was holding on to. When we finally hit the ground, Warren, our instructor had us all kneel in a circle on the ground and get used to breathing underwater for a few minutes. I closed my eyes for a few seconds and just inhaled, slowly and deeply to relax. Then I opened my eyes and it hit me...

There were fish here! Hundreds of fish! Small fish, medium fish, big fish, colorful fish, strange fish. With all the stress of the first few minutes I haven't even noticed that there was life down here: strange wonderful life. Once we were all relaxed, we went through our underwater skills and went for a tour of the area. And then it was time to go up. What seemed like only a few minutes was almost an hour. Time flew by incredibly quickly: perhaps just as everything appears 25% larger and 33% closer underwater, maybe time moves twice as fast as well? At least that's what it seemed like. Back on the boat, I couldn't wait for our second dive of the day. We had to of course get to another dive site and wait for a little while on board before going back, but now the time seemed to drag on. I wanted to be back in the water now! Before we got in again, one of our divemasters gave me an extra 3 pound weight mentioning that I had trouble going below surface and this would help. Then I was coached on exhaling fully before starting my descend: my lungs were big and making me too buoyant. Well, all of this helped me all right. On my second dive I descended like a cannon ball, letting go of the line and dropping to the ground in a couple of seconds. A bit freaky for a beginner, although nowadays quick descend is one of my favourite parts of the dive. Good that it was not over deep water, otherwise who knows how deep I'd have ended up. This and the next two dives were fascinating: my buoyancy was a little better and I could focus on all the wildlife in the sea. I was sad to leave Koh Tao so soon, but promised myself to dive as soon as humanly possible.

This turned out to be about a month later in Nha Trang, Vietnam. By all means, a dive experience which might have turned other beginner divers off from diving. The outfit I chose, Octopus Diving, didn't care about anything but money, and took me out on two fun dives during a typhoon. Imagine sitting underwater watching a coral head and having the coral head disappear in a flash. Only then you realize, the coral head is still there, it's you that's been swept up by the current. When we came up from the second dive we were literally on the edge of the storm: the boat was rocking and the rain was pouring all out. Still, despite the crappy experience I promised myself to get a lot more diving under my belt and so four months later I headed out on another walkabout: this time to become a Divemaster. And now three months later, as I'm writing this, I'm considering diving as a wonderful seasonal career for the foreseeable future...

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