I can’t believe it’s day three of the expedition already. Today, in our first ocean dive, we finally got certified!
After a 40-minute drive filled with Dave’s science playlist songs (think “We Are Made of DNA” and “Monkeys Versus Robots”), we unpacked and suited up to complete our final sets of skills: complete mask removal, hovering with both bcd and oral inflation and CESA.
The water was, surprisingly, not that much colder than the pond, but the visibility was pretty much the same; the cloudy/sandy water and foggy goggles didn’t help. Midway through our 20-foot descent, I could not see either the bottom, the surface or the buoy line a few feet in front of me. People were cloudy black silhouettes that I had to squint at to see. Especially during the buoyancy exercises, I didn’t realize I was slowly rising, or moving at all, until I saw the sky directly above me through the water. But sure enough, by the end of the dive, we were PADI certified! It definitely took a while to sink in: we could now go anywhere, anytime, and dive there.
A pipefish! Just one of many marine species we found today!
Then, as certified divers, we scuba-d along the shore and were given free time to admire the totally seaweed covered rocks and their fishy and crabby inhabitants for the rest of the dive.
-Ming
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