I am a certified diver!
I just recently got certified to be a diver, after almost 4 years of living in Playa and thousands of questions from various friends and family about why I don’t dive. I am pretty happy with the outcome, I am not sure if I am going to be a dedicated diver, but I definately think it is something that will be good to pass a little bit of slow-season.
I did my first two dives(confined water) in a pool, like everyone else. I thought this part was pretty easy, but I did have some issues with bouyancy, I am a big guy and I seem to sink pretty well on my own. The major problem I seemed to have was that I kept trying to clear the water out of my mask by lifting the top of the mask and blowing with my nose, which is sort of the reverse of what I needed to be doing. I thought I got it figured out after a few tries, but it comes up later as a problem.
Now for an aside, sort of…the reason I was motivated to do this learning to dive thing is that my mother was learning to dive at home in the States and was coming down for a visit the day after she did her final certification dive. That meant that she would want to do some diving here, preferably with me, so I needed to get certified ASAP. Luckily, I had a good friend who had offered to give me the class, so I finally took her up on the offer.
As it turns out, my mother was not able to equalize the air pressure in her ears on her certification dive, so when she came down she was not yet a certified diver. We decided that we would do the last dives together, I talked to my friend and she said that would not be a problem, since it was pretty much the same thing for one person or two.
Since the first dives are all about testing dive skills and sort of getting oriented in the water, our instructor(who I might add her name later with her permission) suggested that we go to one of the local cenotes instead of the ocean for the dives. This takes care of a few problems, we avoid that pesky current while we are trying to figure out which way is up and all of the other subtleties of diving, and it is cheaper(I like cheaper). So, we picked Ponderosa cenote, at the Jardin del Eden for our dives.
This is what I look like in a wetsuit
The highlights of the first dives were the turtles floating around and seeming to really not know what these strange creatures were that were invading their space, the ducks that dove to the bottom of the cenote looking for little fish, and of course my complete lack of bouyancy control. I was up and down and all over the place, sometimes bouncing from a nice happy place looking at a something cool to floating uncontrolably towards the surface. After quite a bit of practice I managed to be able to stay wet for a reasonable period of time, though not completely in one place. I guess this is a skill that I will have to work on for a while.
On the next dive we went to Tortuga reef, which is in front of Xcaret. It was a good start, pretty interesting in terms of the creatures running around. Particularly I liked the current, which for some reason made it easier for me to stay in one place(at least vertically). I was severely underweighted, which meant that I was neutrally buoyant even with my BCD completely empty, which was fine for me when I was finally at depth, but to initially sink the first 5 meters was a big deal. The dive instructor actually had to pull my fin so I could get down on this dive.
Tortuga seemed to be what I would call drive-by diving, because the current is moving you along and everything that you are looking at is actually below you, so if you want to stop and stare at something for a while you face into the current and kick, therefore staying in one place.
The Tortuga dive was actually the last certification dive, so at this point I was a certified diver. Woo hoo! We still had one more dive left on the boat, so we headed to Baracuda, where I kind of dropped the ball on some of the skills I was now certified to use.
At Baracuda, you aren’t looking down so much as moving alongside the reef looking laterally at the interesting creatures, then you kind of duck into little bays where there is no current and explore. My instructor had added a bit of weight for this dive, so now I sank like a rock when I wasn’t using proper bouyancy control. Which I wasn’t.
I think I was tired on this dive because I just really was not with it, it was going along alright, although I kind of kept bobbing up and down, then I started to get a little water in my mask(The instructor says that this is from smiling). My mom and our faithful leader were looking at a moray eel in the safety of one of the bays of the reef, so I took the time to get the water out of my mask. I pressed on the mask and blew through my nose, problem: more water in mask than before.
I remembered something about get vertical and look up, then blow through the nose while pressing on your mask. So I did this, pointed towards up I started to blow in my mask. Now my mask is completely full of water, I can’t see anything, I am starting to get a little bit nervous and I notice that I am moving vertically up. By the time I realized that I was moving vertically up I had gotten above the reef, therefore above the protection it offered from the current. I can’t see very well, all I can make out is the blurry figures of my mother and our teacher getting smaller and deeper. All kinds of things pass through my head at this point, many of them being thoughts of motorboats overhead that I can’t see.
I kind of try to calm down, I remember my friend Hans talking about problem-solving on his blog and remembered something he said about solving “one problem at a time.” So I decided that this would all be easier if I could see, so that would be my first task. I recalled that one of my friends that happened to be watching my confined water dives had commented that my method for clearing my mask would be correct if I were in a cave and upside down, so I considered turning upside down in the water to clear my mask but then decided that the easier thing to do would be to push on the top of the mask instead of the bottom. This worked, I could see!
Next problem, I was floating up and away from my group. Well, I could see that I had sort of floated above the reef anyway, so I had to get over and back and down…so deflated my vest and swam across the current until I was close to where they were.
As much of a problem as it seemed for me, they actually didn’t even notice I was gone, so it must really have all happened in a short period of time. We carried on with the rest of the dive and we made it back to the boat without incedent.
We will see where it goes, I am not so sure that its the activity for me. At least now when people ask my if I dive I can say yes.