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Published: March 26th 2006
Wow have i got a story for you! So as you all know we all did our open water scuba diving course which allows us to go to a maximum depth of 18m and we cant go on night dives and stuff like that so we talked to our instructors and they told us that we could take another courses so we could be advanced open water divers. we thought it was a great idea however it was very expensive and we weren’t willing to pay that much. so then they told us that we can do an adventure dive and this means that if you do the deep dive then you can dive to a maximum of 30 m instead of 18 m and if you do the night dive then you can dive at night. So basically you can just do parts of the advanced diver thing and not pay as much.
Night dive...
First of all I thought night diving was completely against all of the rules, apparently its not. I guess you can see different types of fish and stuff. so anyways we decided to do the night dive and I was very nervous about this from the beginning, your at the bottom of the ocean in pitch black holding a little flashlight....scary. When we went to the dive shop before the dive we found out that our instructor who taught us our open water course wasn’t coming, some other girl named Andrea would be taking us out, now I’m even more apprehensive because this girl doesn’t even know us. Anyways we get to the dive sight and it is still a little light out so we put all of our gear on and jump into the water. we descend as usual and start swimming. about 10 min into it another dive shop called "shark" swam right in between our group, Marie got a little confused and started following them! After about 10 seconds she noticed that there were big stickers that said shark on their tanks and we didn’t have any stickers on ours. she then noticed that one of the people in the other group didn’t have a sticker so she thought it was me but when she got closer realized it wasn’t, so she went up to their instructor and using her hands told him that she lost her "buddy" and the instructor told her that she should go to the surface. MEANWHILE i am still with our group but realize that Marie isn’t right beside me, so I start to panic a little bit. i swam up to Jason and Jeff and and they didn’t know where she was either so i then swam up to the instructor, pulled her fins so she would turn around then i tried to tell her that I lost my buddy (everyone has a buddy and you are supposed to stay with your buddy, your buddy is supposed to help you if you have a problem) the instructor wasn’t understanding what I was saying, she thought I was scared and wanted to be her buddy for the rest of the dive. Now I start to cry, I had no idea where Marie was I didn’t know if she was hurt, the first thing that came to my head was that she was eaten by a shark, of course that wasn’t true but you always think of the worst, I was at the bottom of the ocean and it was pitch black except for the little bit of light my flashlight provided and I thought I was going to drown because it was so hard to breath out of the regulator when your freaking out. Anyways I went back to the instructor and tried to get my point across again, it didn’t work, she kept asking me if I was “ok” using the hand signs and I kept saying no, finally I convinced her to go to the surface and when we got there I screamed I lost my buddy and she said “oh well she probably went with the other group”, ok how can you just assume that she is with the other group!!!! I was so mad when she said that. The instructor basically said that Marie is fine and we are going back down, I refused to go back down and started swimming towards the boat, which was about 200 meters away. The swim back to the boat was horrifying I thought I was going to get run over by a boat for sure, so I was swinging my flashlight around in all directions. As I got closer to the boat I screamed help in my little whimpering crying voice, Marie was thankfully on the boat and heard me, she came to the other side of the boat and waited for me to swim the rest of the way. I was so relieved she was ok, I would have to say that this was one of the scariest moments of my life.
Before the dive Andrea shared with us some of the stuff we would be seeing like: a barracuda eating little fish, the barracuda uses your light to see other fish. Andrea had just found a barracuda and was about to find a little fish when I came barreling through the group signing that I had lost Marie. Some of the other divers were a bit mad because they thought I was trying to move in front of then so I could see the killing better. Another cool thing we missed was if everyone turns off their light and you wave your arms around then the water is supposed to glow or something, I don’t really know because we didn’t do it.
We laugh about the whole thing now, but at the time it wasn’t funny at all. AND we have to go on another night dive tomorrow night because we weren’t down for long enough to get our freaking certificate. This time we are going with Chris, our instructor from before, and as of now it is just the 2 of us, so I think it will be a better experience. One more thing we thought we deserved a little treat after all of this so we went to an expensive place for dinner, I got a full portion of ribs and Marie got a salmon stake, very good.
We also did the deep dive today so now we can dive to 30 m all over the world. This dive was the morning after our night dive so we were still a little shaky. We saw some eels and a huge lobster like thing. They also brought a bag of chips down to 30 m so we could see how compressed it would get, it was also red at the surface but down at 30 m it was black, red is the first color you lose when you’re that deep.
Sorry for making you go grey and bald grampy but it if wasn’t for our mishaps you guys would be bored to death.
Hope you guys are enjoying your snow while I’m enjoying my sun.
Ps I’m not going to elope!... Elise and Raj
Emily
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Mr. Maas
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You Go Girl!
Hi Em! Your mom emailed me some info about your travel blog so I thought I'd drop you a comment! Hey it sounds like you're having the adventure of a lifetime! Have a wonderful time, take a lot of pictures, and stay safe! I'm sure I'd probably faint if I saw you all grown up now. All the best on your trip! Mr. Maas (your grade 6 teacher)