Adam's scuba day!

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Corresponding pictures to this post are located here.

While Cassie’s most anticipated excursion for this vacation occurred a couple days ago in playing with the elephants in Chiang Mai, today was my big day. I signed up for a discover scuba diving trip with our resort’s in house scuba company, Dive and Relax. I have always been intrigued and yet scared at the prospect of being 20-30 feet below in the ocean and being able to view sea life in its pristine environment. Plus I heard that it got you chicks, preferably one of the two types that Cassie mentioned in her post. I kid, I kid. So after a sleepless night where I had visions of myself kicking ass underwater, I met up with the scuba group. If you must know, I dreamt of wrestling down a leopard shark with my bare hands, using my natural grappling skills to vanquish my foe. The scuba group numbered about 10 certified divers who were able to go on their own scuba adventure unsupervised and 5 or 6 snorkelers who didn’t have the balls to do manly things like scuba. That left me and a French lady who were going to scuba for the first time. Since it doesn’t make sense for me to be taught by a French instructor (sorry, 4 years of French class in the Oakland Unified Public School system a French speaker does not make. Any one of my past classmates would surely vouch for that), and an English instructor would surely make life tough on a frenchy, we each had our own instructor for the dives. At least, this was what was explained to me by the organizer of the trip. Upon meeting the other newbie, while she did have a french accent, she also spoke english fluently and her Frenchy instructor gave her instructions in English as well, albeit with a French drawl. Either way, we both got 1 to 1 instruction and with my penchant for forgetting instructions or just not following them, this was a very good thing.

So now we arrived at the dive site, a lagoon off of the island, Ko Haa. It’s a good site for beginners as there are lots of fish within our mandated maximum depth of 12 meters or 36 ft. After suiting up, I hopped into the water for a series of instructions and exercises. These included important things like clearing the mouthpiece of water and also being able to locate the mouthpiece should it inadvertently fall out in middle of the dive. Fumbling around futilely looking for my precious giver of lifeblood at 25 ft below the surface is not the way I want to go out. After clumsily attempting this action a couple times, I finally got it right and it was time to get going with the dive. I have no confidence that in the event of losing my regulator (mount up), I would actually be able to compose myself and check down the list. More likely than not, I would thrash about and kick up to the surface, giving myself the bends or a blown lung in the process. As I am here typing this out to you, it’s pretty much obvious that my mouthpiece stayed securely on my mouth on both dives.

For those of you who have never had the pleasure of scuba diving, the feeling of being weightless in the water while watching fish swim right by your face is awesome and strangely arousing. This is true, except for the arousing part. If you’re like me on my first dive, however, you’d feel more like a yo yo. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to maintain my buoyancy. First, I dropped like a rock. Then, I frantically tried to become more buoyant and I shot up to the surface like a helium trader joe’s balloon that a two year old toddler carelessly let go. The reason behind this is twofold. The story behind buoyancy is we have a vest that can be pumped full of oxygen to cause us to rise. The vest can also deflate by releasing the oxygen, causing the diver to sink. There are two buttons that control these actions. In all my infinite wisdom, I forgot which button did what and had to use the trial and error approach, much to my instructor’s chagrin. Thus, the yo yo effect came into play. You would think the top button would deflate the vest and cause you to surface and the bottom button would cause you to sink, no? Ohhhhhhhhh no. It’s completely the opposite, a fact that my mind never got around to adapting to. My instructor eventually conceded defeat and controlled my elevation after I sunk down to 16 meters, 4 meters past the stated max for the course, one too many times. An additional 4 meters might not sound like a lot, but when you are only allowed to go down to 36 feet and here you are at 48 feet, it was probably cause for some alarm. Fortunately, I was able to somewhat master the buoyancy aspect for the 2nd dive in using my lung capacity to achieve equilibrium.

As for the fish we saw, there were so many. While I was not able to see the noted clownfish, I did see his buddy the sea turtle swimming around. Schools of barracudas darted all over the place as well as a porcupine fish and umbrella fishes. I saw fishes of all sorts of colors and designs. And you can too, if you follow my three easy steps of flying out to Thailand, booking a scuba course with Dive and Relax, and then mastering the art of buoyancy. This little taste of diving has left me tempted to get certified once I get back home so that I can view and explore more of Atlantis’ world. And on that note, I can end this by quoting lyrics from the immortal Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle song, “A Whole New World.” But that would be cliché and, I gotta admit, pretty girly. Instead, I’ll roll out with Civ’s “Boring Summer”: “There’s a world outside, join it sometime. Think you’re stepping out but you’re standing in line. … Get down.”

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Comments

[Candyann]

bends
You didn't dive deep enough to get the bends anyways.