The "future" and the past!

Today marked my first session of ocean dives in my Open Water certification.  We had our gear from Thursday night and after lugging all this wet gear into my house including gear bag with BCD, Regs, mask, snorkle, fins, boots, gloves and hood, my undergarments, a bag with my "dry" suit, my weight belt  and weight bag containing ankle weights, bullet weights, and my integrated weights and, last but not least 3 full air tanks. I got to carry it all back outside this morning at 7:00 so that I could load up in my dive buddy's vehicle and drive to the dive site.  I barely slept last night, excitement, nerves, all of the above... whatever it was... not a great sleep... thank goodness for Monster energy drinks...lol.  Morning was great, got lost a couple times going to the site, but we found it (good thing we left early and allowed a lot of time).  Unloaded everything, started putting together our kits and got everything lined up for ocean dive number one.  But before we can dive.. we must... da da da...

TEST!!
So, 50 questions, multiple choice, covering all 5 chapters, minimum 75% to pass... that's like, like, like.... oh man, my brain is so full of diving I can't remember my math.... what in the world is 75% of 50... this should be so easty... it's... it's... oh yeah right 37.5, thank you to all of you screaming that out for me... lol.  So, if I can manage 38 right.. I'm golden.  I'm doing OK out of the gates, "What happens to air in a balloon filled at the surface as you descend to 30 feet?" "B", "What happens when you ascend with a glass full of air?" "A",  "What are the most important features of an exposure suit?" "D, all of the above"... lol.  Then we get to the eRDPml (remember this from Tuesday "  ") Now for those of you who remember high school math where you had the word problems like "A train traveling from Chicago headed to Seattle detouring through Salt Lake City traveling at 75 miles an hour except in the mountains or during lunch on Tuesdays, leaves on Friday at 2:03, with 271 passengers 5 crew and a full luggage car.  What did they serve for lunch?" lol.. will understand what it feels like to use one of these dive calculators under pressure on a test that decides if you are diving, or just watching!.  Needless to say, I passed.. I managed a 48/50, 96% missing 2 of the dumbest questions that I should be shot for missing, on one I ended up selecting the box for the obviously wrong answer that they throw in there as a gimme...

Well, we all passed, now into the water for dive one, on dive one we will have a tour of Porteau Cove and some of the spectacular life and items under the surface, dive two is skill tests and a tour and dive three is a few more skill tests before our final tour of Porteau Cove and the swim in.

Dive one, was interesting, we make a buddy descent to approximately 20 feet, group up and follow Dennis for our initial tour of the bottom.  Now to try to achieve and maintain neutral buoyancy, not as easy as it sounds, but once this is accomplished and you take your first few kicks of open ocean diving, you have experienced a small slice of heaven!  At this point the group is more or less relaxed, no more kicking so hard we stir up sediment, less crashes into the bottom and off for our first tour of our section of the cove.  It's amazing what you can see down there, crab everywhere, fields of jellyfish, starfish running (albeit not very fast) across the bottom and when you finally get your bearings and your focus, you start noticing the little things like the sole and ling cod and the occasional green ling.  What an amazing world!

Dives two and 3 were skills, like body breathing, mask and regulator recovery, introduction to navigation and buddy navigation and other basic skills followed another tour with Dennis in the lead and Virpi bringing up the straglers.  These dives were the best, by this point most of us had sorted out buoyancy issues, and had calmed down allowing us to just float through the water and REALLY experience the life down there you don't see anywhere else like over 100 species including octopus, and plumose anemones and some items from our past that you would never imagine seeing like the Granthall (a steal hulled tug boat), the Centennial III (a steal dredger) and a 15 m ferrocement sailboat hull.

Overall, this was the final thing needed to firm up my decision to keep diving as often as possible, because again, in the words of Nathan Hale Bridger - "For beneath the surface ... Lies the Future."