The monkey made me do it

I think I just found a piece of kelp in my hair

There really is nothing like having that "click" feeling that is created when a person finds that special activity/person/clothing item/??? that they were absolutely 100% MEANT to do/have/be with. I'm speaking particularly of the activity section of that, since the person/clothing item/??? side hasn't quite made any sort of noise for me besides a sort of vague "errr" or sometimes a "bah".

This past Saturday I very carefully wrapped myself in not-one-but-two thick wetsuits (one had no arms, one had no legs and a hood. Who decides this? Are they feeling all right?), somehow managed to strap on 46 lbs. of weights that the instructor promised would make things easier (except the walking and ability to convince my body that toppling over on the rocky seashore is a bad idea), geared up with more hoses and levers than I properly knew what to do with, and hopped into the mind-numbingly frigid waters of the lovely Puget Sound to get my scuba open water diver certification.

The water was in the low 40-degree range, full of sediment that left our visibility at around 6 feet (3 feet the second day), and left disgusting green streaks on the few bits of skin that were exposed to its pea-soup-ness. It tasted a little like miso soup. Lots of seaweed bits floating around. But still, click! I got the hang of everything quickly skill-wise (we'd done most things a couple weeks before in the swimming pool, but not in water that numbed your lips within seconds) and soon was playing around with my buoyancy while the rest of the class was going though their testing. When we kicked off to tour the area a little, I couldn't look at everything enough - the way the fin kicks of the girl in front of me rippled the kelp on the sea floor, how fascinating a discarded beer bottle became when crusted with sea life. When we found an old toilet half-buried in the sea floor with anenomes sprouting from the rim, I actually clapped in delight (gaining me a very odd look from one of the dive masters, but I was beyond caring).

The second dive of our first day we practiced some emergency safety manuevers, one of which consisted of a lot of overexaggerated "omigod I'm going to die" miming and a very slow ascent from 20 feet below the water to the surface with my "buddy" breathing from my emergency regulator mouthpiece. I was having a grand old time, swimming slowly and trying to get us to make circles, and when we broke the surface I inflated my vest as I was supposed to and calmly held up my buddy, who was supposed to be inflating her vest as well (though with her mouth, since she was out of air in the drill). Unfortunately, she freaked out once we got up and thought that we were going down again - I'm not sure why this was bad, since we both had air and masks still on, but panic rarely follows logic - so she grabbed my inflator and filled my already-full vest with so much air that my ribs were pushed in and I couldn't catch my breath. Of course, as in all emergencies and moments where I'm in any amount of danger, I thought this was funny and started laughing. She didn't notice, luckily, as she was crying by this point (I didn't see that she was so upset, or I probably would have reacted differently). The instructor floating directly behind me saw the bubbles exploding from out of the back of my vest's over-inflation indicator and swam over to investigate. She pulled the lever in the center of the indicator, not really knowing what would happen, and all of us simultaneously learned that my vest was equipped with an instructor button that immediately FULLY deflated all equipment and sank me and my 46 pounds of extra baggage back under the water again, dragging along my poor traumatized buddy in the process (who was now kicking me hard with her fins, trying her hardest to stay at the top).

The really funny part about all of this was that the instructor didn't tell me her particular role in this until the second day (she was so embarrassed), so in my ignorance I just thought that I'd been somehow pulled under by my buddy and reinflated my vest as quickly as I could, bobbing around like a demented pool toy and cracking up. The instructor was glad that I was laughing about it all, but ended up having to talk down my buddy for a while before she'd trust me with anything important again.

So anyways, I did four dives and saw all of two fish (and one might have been a stick, it was hard to tell), a bunch of anenomes, some bottles, kelp, and a toilet - and I'm hooked! More people need to learn how to do this so we can go places and do things and look at stuff. I promise to find conditions better than the ones I just experienced, and to make it fun for all involved. I've already been experimenting with new fin-kicks - there's this one where you kick like a jackknife and use both fins at once and it's so cool and you end up like three feet above where you started without hardly moving at all...

I'm getting geeky about all of this but have a hard time caring. Hooray for new hobbies!

posted by LadyJay @ 2:18 PM