Scuba diving certification: Day 2

SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT I only have 10 days left in Indonesia. I cannot BELIEVE this! I am having just way too good a time and I am way too relaxed to have to think about going back to school. Okay, I’m going to just block it out and think about other things...

...like scuba diving, which is what I spent 90% of my time today doing. Three open water dives! Amazing!! I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but they put me in progressively easier places each time; my first dive I was literally thrown into the deep end and checked to see if I would sink (actually the goal here) or swim (back to the boat).

I don't know if it was nerves that did me in during the first dive or if any other novice would have reacted the same, but I was seriously struggling and getting a bit freaked out about 20-30 minutes into it.  I was paired up with a French woman who was working with Rubiah Tirta to become a dive master so she could be an instructor at a dive shop herself.  She was really nice and tried to give me advice and help me out, but I don't think she knew when or where to have me do my skills test because we had been swimming underwater for a good 40 minutes before I gave the signal to go up and she hadn't shown any interest in testing me on anything other than my swimming and breathing abilities.  Why did I signal to go up?  The current.  It was strong enough that we would kick for thirty seconds without going anywhere.  I would hold on to rocks or coral and nearly get ripped off by the force of it.  I tried to keep up with my buddy (Marie I think?), but the effort it took meant I was getting short of breath, a condition the book definitely warns you is dangerous.  When you dive, you're not breathing atmospheric air but a thinner gas that has a much higher percentage of oxygen.  Exertion increases the CO2 levels in your blood and your body just doesn't react well.  I had to rest several times and since I was getting quite anxious about the whole thing I just signaled that I wanted to go up.  Fortunately, we weren't the first ones out of the water or I would have felt really bad!

Once we got back on the boat I was comforted to hear that others had  struggled with the current, too, so I felt like less of a noob.  What I saw down there was absolutely brillitant, though.  Coral growing on gigantic boulders, fish ranging in size from a dime to the length of my forearm in color combinations that I never would have put together but certainly couldn't improve on, either.  Delicate, white anemones that looked like soap bubbles and very convincingly made you think you could pop them with a touch from your finger rather than they send you to the emergency room.  And the visibilty was incredible!  A hundred feet, maybe?  You could see giant coral fans and flashes of silvery fish dozens of meters below you.  Everyone else on the boat kept saying how lucky I was to be getting my certification here and i think there's something to that.  I wish I could say these photos were mine, but they come from various dive sites and are from someone else's trip, not mine.  I have a very strong feeling that I will be investing in a new, waterproof digital camera before my next trip. 

My second dive was later in the morning with Salim and we started with the skills test that I was somewhat dreading.  It was just the basics, nothing fancy since this was my first time going down to 12m, but I still had to do the dreaded the mask fill and clear.  It just doesn't get any less creepy no matter how often I do it, and I seemed to do it quite a lot because even though it would feel like I filled it, Salim always said to do it again.  In the end he just pulled it off my face for me, which really didn't feel great, but it got it done.  Despite a bit of awkwardness, though, at the end of our dive Salim said I was learning really quickly and that he was really proud of my progress!  Yeah for us over-achievers!

That afternoon he took me to what would turn out to be one of my favorite sites of the four that I went to: Rubiah Utara (at this site you can see description of the sites around Weh; I went to 9 or 10, 7, 4, 8 and 3 in that order).  It's beyond my vocabulary to convey the amazing feeling of being down there, but imagine this: you're weightless and floating as neon fish weave and bob around you and coral grows in fans and branches below you.  Along your side is a sheer, vertical rock face, except you can't see it because it's covered in vibrant marine life.  The current pushes you lazily above eels, octopi, scorpion fish, and clown fish in their dangerous homes.  It's not totally quiet, there's a slight, high-pitched hum, almost like a weak electric charge, with almost imperceptible cracks and pops.  It's like being a room that is completely devoid of sound, yet somehow from somewhere there's white noise pushing into your head.  It's exactly like that.  It was a great way to end my first real day of diving, although I kind of wish I had been to this site first so that I would have had a bit more courage before going out to where the current was stronger.  But, hey, a little trial by fire is a good thing once in a while.

The last thing I had to do today was fill in my dive log, which is a record of your total bottom time, your starting and ending pressure group from each dive (which dictates your rest time between dives), and a description of what you did and saw while you were underwater. My running total after today: 2.5 hours. My pressure group: Q (it goes from A to Z, where A requires little to no rest time and Z requires a day).

Okay, I’m exhausted and I’m going on a dawn dive tomorrow, so I’m signing off. I need to focus on my chapatti with vegetables and chocolate coconut pancake before finding my way up to my bungalow, and all of that will take a major effort by itself.