Drs. Cove, Catalina Island

This past weekend and next weekend my life is being consumed by a PADI scuba certification class. Actually, before these weekends even arrived I had to spend about five hours studying a book on gear, rules and regulations and watching instructional videos. Now for these two weeks we spend Saturdays in class for the first half of the day reviewing skills and equipment (so we can pass our written exam at the end of the course) and then the second half of the day in a pool, practicing the skills and using the equipment that we have just reviewed. Sundays are the fun part, we spend both Sundays completing our open water training dives! My class started out with 5 students and two instructors. Our instructor's names are Tony (the guy with the pony tail and the tye dye shirt) and V (she won't tell us what it stands for, she is from Australia and she is training to be a divemaster). We had one male student, Sam who got kicked out as soon as we got to the pool and had to tread water for 10 minutes - he apparently didn't think swimming was an important skill for scuba diving. Of the four of us left, one lady (who had clearly been coerced into signing up by her husband) decided that scuba was "too cold and too wet" after our pool dive so she didn't show up at the boat Sunday morning. The three of us who did were me, a girl with red hair named Abby and an asian girl named Carolyn. I don't know how anyone invented scuba diving because it requires a huge amount of extremely heavy and extremely uncomfortable (at least on land) gear. After quite nearly reaching the point of total exhaustion just trying to get into my wetsuit, I was standing in line wearing my STEEL tank waiting for the divemaster to tell me it was my turn to jump in and thinking that there was at least a 50/50 chance that I would require immediate rescue as soon as I entered the water and proceeded to rocket to the bottom (somehow these thoughts hadn't occurred to me during the five hours we spent in 6-feet of pool water the day before). The next 15 minutes were a blur, one moment my shaking hands (whether shaking from nerves, or the strain of the tank cutting off all circulation I don't know) were fumbling with my fins and then my attention was completely consumed: inflate your BCD! hold your mask! hold your regulator! big step! look up! I didn't sink! this water is freezing! signal OK to the divemaster! try to pee in the suit! this water is freezing! switch to my snorkel! find my buddy! this water is freezing! try to pee in the suit! s.o.r.t.d. (signal, orient, regulator, time, descend)! equalize! descend! equalize! this water is freezing! try to pee in the suit! descend! equalize! Are you getting the picture? The next thing I know my knees are hitting the sand, we are thirty feet below the boat and everything is silent. As soon as Abby (by buddy) made it down we signaled OK to each other and waited for Tony, V and Carolyn. It turned out that Carolyn's hood was too tight so she and V went back to the boat. Abby and I followed Tony around for about half an hour during which I took about a million pictures and didn't look at my gauges once. Thank goodness Tony was in charge! It turns out that this was what they expected, that first dive was called our "exploration dive" and was meant to let us get used to the equipment and the environment and (in my case) to let us take a ridiculously large yet satisfying amount of pictures. Abby is wearing the red snorkel with the splash guard on top, my snorkel is black - unfortunately red is the first color that is filtered out as we descend so another clue is that my back-up regulator (the yellow one) is tucked up into the strap of my BCD and Abby's isn't. Tony has his big white instructor cards clipped to him. It was much more comfortable/relaxing once we got to the bottom... I didn't take my camera on the second dive because we had to do all these skills (buddy breathing, mask clearing, regulator recovery, etc) and I didn't want to get distracted. I had fun, although my favorite part of the trip was the sunset ride back (beer in hand) and I am hoping I will be a little less stressed next week :)