OCEAN DIVE

The title of this post definitely deserves to be in all-caps because of how amazing it was. I went on three, 40 minutes, beautiful dives in Gordon's Bay, a bit north of Sydney. Today was our skills test, so we had to show the instructors how we could remove and return our face masks and regulators (the thing you breath out of). But it would be too easy to show them how to do it on land, we had to sit on the bottom of the bay (a good 10m deep) and remove our gear and put it back on. It was scary, but now if it ever happens on accident I feel very prepared and able to fix any problem underwater.

Yesterday, all I did was go to class, nap, eat, and go to sleep. For some reason, I was extremely tired, so I took the day off from doing anything exciting. For this reason, I figure today will have two pictures instead of one, to make up for not having one yesterday. This one is of the coast that we entered the water from. The narrow, somewhat flat area near the middle is where we walked in. It was actually pretty scary because the waves would go from small to big really quick and if you didn't kick hard (really hard), they would knock you backwards and into the rocks. Quite the exciting rush.


And of course, I can't spend all day in a SCUBA outfit and not take a picture. The gear is literally close to 30-35 kilos (close to 70 pounds), and in the picture you can't see the enormous air cylinder strapped to my back. The face mask came up a little high, we're going out diving again tomorrow, to a nicer site, maybe then I'll make sure to take a picture where you can see the foolish grin that anyone has after exhausting themselves scuba diving.


Speaking of foolish grins, a funny thing that happened in the water was that we came up to a school of long, skinny silvery fish. The entire school were just drifting together, somehow all the same distance from the fish around them. I thought it was so cool that I was seeing them up close that I started grinning, and the grin shifted my face mask and filled it with water. Luckily, they taught us a really cool method of blowing out of your nose and holding the mask at the correct angle to clear it.

Tomorrow, a new dive, more pictures. Plus, certification. So probably, more dives.