Adventures in Diving

I have been a PADI certified diver for almost 5 years now. I got certified in Alaska. Yes, you heard me. It took quite a while to get certified there. We started in April. We did all our swimming pool dives. The ones where you go under in the deep end, fill you mask with water, clear it. Learn to jump into the water with all your gear on. Learn your buoyancy. All the basic things that if you were to try and learn in a lake, or ocean might scare you senseless. It took a week I think, of night time pool visits to learn. We also had to get trained on the dry suit...... Isn't it pretty? We had to learn to use this kind of suit, because as I said before, we were in Alaska. The dry suit freaked me out because there are these rubber seals around your neck and wrists to keep the suit waterproof. If you put them on wrong you can have very dangerous problems. If your neck seal is too high, you will cut off circulation and pass out underwater, and well, die. If your seals on your wrists are too tight, you will cut off circulation in your arm, and again, serious complications. While in the pool I had a wrist seal on wrong, and my entire arm went numb and hurt for a few days after. Anyway, after all the pool stuff, we had to wait until June before we could do our open water dives. Pretty much because we had to wait for the Pond to thaw, so we could go in.

(Bathing Beauty Pond when frozen.... where we did our first certification dives)

It took me several days, because on our first day I got so cold, I started to shiver uncontrollably, which is bad. Finally though, after toughing out the super cold water dive, both Tim and I got certified. Then we moved here!

Okinawa is an amazing dive location. The waters are clear, warm, and filled with gorgeous tropical fish, and while there are definitely aquatic hazards to look out for, a great place to be if you like to dive. Since being here, I have been on one dive. Mostly because I seem to keep having babies, but also because diving takes time, which means babysitters, and that's not always the easiest thing to do with 4 kids. However, this last month, Tim and I decided to get Advanced certified. Last week we went on 2 dives together, one of which to learn how to better our buoyancy underwater, and the other was a night dive. The night dive was a source of lots of nervousness for me. I just kept imagining pitch black water, running into the reefs, having sea snakes chase our lights. It was actually quite a lot less terrifying than I'd imagined. First, with the moon, it wasn't pitch black. It was dark, but even with all our lights off, you could still see each other. It was also very neat to wiggle our arms and fins around and see the bio-luminescent creatures light up. That in itself was worth the entire dive. We saw

Angel Fish

Sea Snakes

Puffer Fish

and there was an octopus, but I didn't see that one.

Tomorrow we finish our dives. We have to do three more to become certified. Our first will be going deep. The deepest this certification lets you go is about 120 feet, I don't know if we'll go that deep, but diving deep scares me just because I hate having to equalize my ears just to go down 30 feet! After our deep dive, we'll do another dive learning underwater navigation, then another learning Fish ID. Then in a few weeks, we're going to try and go dive the Kerama Islands where amazing sea life is supposed to be plentiful. I don't know if we'll have a dive camera by then, to take pictures, but hopefully we'll know someone that comes with us that will, so I can put up some pictures.