Water is - without a doubt - my favourite element. It has a refreshing and cleansing quality on many levels: from the literal to the spiritual. It's always a treat when I get to swim in the ocean and snorkel. I feel at home and at ease in water.
Scuba diving is something I've always wanted to learn how to do, but never got around to doing it. We didn't plan on scuba diving during our Philippines trip, but when we found out that Bohol had great dive sites, we just had to dive in, so to speak.
After our already long day of island hopping on Monday, Nov. 22, we crammed in an introductory course with a German dive master at our resort in the afternoon. After showing us a quick video demonstrating some of the theory, we went right into an open water dive.
Most divers have to practice closed water diving (swimming pool) first, so we really lucked out by getting a chance to take this crash course. We learned the few basis skills from putting on our regulator (the air mouth piece) on above water and in the water, to equalizing as we got deeper into the water, to emptying the water in our mask if any got in underwater.
We then proceeded to explore the water near our resort and went as deep as 11 meters, which was quite a feat for our very first time. It was really neat being underwater for as long as we were - about 45 minutes - and not having to up for air once. Really strange and cool feeling.
Diving really depends on good communication and teamwork - and for someone with massive ADD like me, I really had to pay attention. But the three of us worked really well as a team - and used hand signals to communicate effectively with each other. The trainer was very attentive and always checked in to make sure we were ok.
I both love and am terrified of the deep water. Staring into the foreign marine life both fascinates me and also frightens me. And as I looked down the sloping cliff where the water went from a dark blue into pitch black, I literally felt my body grow lighter than it already felt suspended on the ocean water.
We scaled around a beautiful coral formation and admired the interesting fish and vegetation, including this cool brown, shaggy carpet like plant. There were also a lot of those Nemo fish. We then slowly swam up the sloped cliff.
Some of the cool moments included swimming right above Andrew and seeing his exhalation bubbles rise up towards me; small bubbles - dozens of them - just engulfing my sight line and then fizzing away above me.
I'm definitely going to work on getting my diving license when we get back to Toronto. This won't be the last time I do this and next time, I'd definitely like to go deeper.
No comments:
Post a Comment