Dive Into Your Imagination

It's time for the ocean!!! Yes, fish, urchins, sand, starfish, kelp, anemones, and.....mask removal!? Yes, part of getting scuba certified includes removing and replacing your mask. I had a hard enough time doing this in the pool and hated losing that sense of security, but doing it in the ocean was horrible! I am glad I got that over with because there is nothing worse than having the ocean going up your nose, well actually there is. On top of this discomforting experience was a small surge which would cause us to sway back and forth as we were settled in a graveyard of mussel shells and urchins.

This made make things a bit more complicated. Like the pool, I was also beginning to roll backwards and lose control of my body with fear that I would be picking urchins out of my behind all day. But once we finished the exercises, it was nice to just take another look around. Annie took Rebecca and I by the hand and pointed out all the weird life growing on itself, and took us through kelp forests and introduced us to Mr. Garibaldi. She even handed me a sea cucumber which, through my gloves, felt like some sort of foam latex puppet. Is this for real?!

After getting my mask back on I relaxed alot and grew acustomed to the surge, the pressure, the fish and my breathing. The weird thing was moving around, you can see in the video that Im using my hands. It didn't take long until I was able to use my feet to do most of my navigating and swinging from kelp to kelp was also very fun because being down there, it was hard to get a sense of my depth. I was moving up and down alot and really giving my ears a workout. At one point, Rebecca got a bit too high and the air in her BCD expanded taking her up right away. She reached for us in horror as if she was being sucked in by a black hole. Of course, she was fine and we both realized that controlling our bouyancy was the first thing we needed to master in our underwater learning. It's good to have goals.