Soul Searching

I’ve been dying to go diving for years and the right opportunity never presented itself. The certification course is 4 days. Who wants to take 4 days out of their vacation to study and work (especially if it’s not chinese medicine!)?

Anyway, here I was on a beach that you can’t lay or walk on, a tiny cold swimming pool, feeling tired (I haven’t yet had a day where I’m not treating people), and watching all of these divers going out and back to the ocean. So I meandered down to the dive shop and asked what I could do without being certified or getting certified. The coordinator asked me if I had done any previous diving. I said no, but I’ve snorkled a bunch. He said, no problem, promptly got me set up with a dive master and suited me up.

The dive master asked me if I wanted to go to the pool to train, and I asked him if I needed it. He said we could do it all in the ocean if I wasn’t scared. So we went to the beach area and he told me how to breathe and some hand signals and in five minutes we were under the water and heading towards the wreck!

The first thing we saw was a black tipped shark. Not especially scary (particularly because it was headed in the opposite direction!). Then we went on to the wreck. It was pretty fun though not spectacular, I’ve had snorkelling adventures that were much more intense in terms of fish and coral, but it was wonderful and exciting. We dove through the wreck, went down to 16 meters, and made it back in 50 minutes with plenty of air left in the tanks. All in all pretty fun.

I went again the next day and this dive guy barely looked at me the whole time, which was fine with me (the other guy was VERY attentive) and we dove at the local reef. Also not that spectacular. We saw lots of different fish. A couple of those rock fish. The ones that paralyze you if brush their fins.

The whole experience was exotic. I loved turning circles and looking up above at the surface… at the reef there was a submerged plane wreck from ww2, very bizarre…

All in all I wouldn’t recommend it. One guy told me that there are a lot of rare fish here and that’s one of the draws for people. He was into underwater photography (as were many of the people here). I have to say their apparatus was far scarier than anything i saw under the water…