Hello everyone. I said I would blog about scuba diving, so here it is. The past two weekends (not this one), Amanda and I were working through our “open water” scuba dive course. This allows us to be able to scuba dive in the ocean, as well as lakes, etc. without an instructor up to 18 meters deep in favourable conditions. We really enjoyed our time in Cairns at the Great Barrier Reef diving, so we thought getting certified was the next step.
The first day, two Saturdays ago from today, was our first day. We had to get up at 7:00 every morning we went scuba diving. Our class started at 8:00, and we got picked up at 7:45 by our friend, who was also in the class, named Nick. Class started with knowledge review, in which we went over the questions from our study guides in our scuba dive book. Essentially, it felt like a class, and apparently you can try to get college credit from it...but we aren’t going to worry about that. It was a lot of information to go over, and we did about 60% of it the first day. That lasted until about 10 or so, and then we went to the pool. The first day, we had a swimming test of sorts, where we had to swim 200m as well as float for 10 minutes. This did not seem too hard on paper, but all of us in the class (4 of us that day) were super winded from it. After this, we got our scuba stuff on and went in. I remembered the sensation from the Reef about what it felt like to breathe underwater, but it was still a little weird at first. Amanda and I also had wetsuit problems the first day-our wetsuits were too small, thus it didn’t go so well getting those in, and I got tired just from pulling it on. We practiced basic skills that day, like flooding your mask, and taking your “second stage” (your breathing device) out and finding it. Pretty simple stuff.
The second day (Sunday), it was very hard to get up. We were very sore from the day before; putting together the equipment, carrying it, etc., is quite heavy. That day, we did more knowledge review, finishing it off. We got all of our stuff and drove to the pool again. This day, we practiced a lot more stuff, like going to the deep end and practicing descents and ascents. We felt pretty confident after day 2 to go put our skills into the ocean, which was good.
The third day, we took our final exam; we both passed, Amanda being an ultra nerd and acing it...haha. We then drove down to Rockingham, about 30 minutes south, to go to a cool beach with lots of wrecks off it. We got in, and the water was freezing! To convert the temp it was to Fahrenheit, it was...66 degrees or so. That doesn’t sound too cold, but it was freezing. We were all shivering right after we got in. We were on the surface treading water for a while because there was a strong current, and one of our group members had a hard time swimming over to us. We finally went underwater, and the visibility was about 3 meters, which is not very far. It was very difficult because we couldn’t see everyone in our group, and our instructor Phil had to keep swimming back and forth making sure we were all there. We did see a blue swimmer crab (yes they are blue); that was pretty cool! We saw a couple wrecks, but with the bad vis., it was hard to actually appreciate it. We were going to do a couple skills, but it was too hard to see, so we just swam around. After the first dive, we drove to a different site to try to get better visibility. It was just as cold, but the current was not as strong. We went under and did most of our skills; the problem this time was that the bottom was a silt type, meaning when we moved around, the bottom did too. We had to keep moving around to get to a new place without the dirty cloud we kicked up. After practicing our skills a little more (p.s. salt water in the mask/eyes is not cool!), we swam around and saw a couple cool things. Then we got out because we were freezing.
The fourth day, we went to Rottnest Island. It is about a 40 minute boat drive off the coast of Fremantle, and it was definitely worth it! The water out there was around 70 degrees or so, which felt a lot warmer. The visibility was also great, probably around 10 meters. There was a little bit of current, but definitely not as bad. There, we practiced a couple skills, but it was mostly trying to be a little more independent and just swim around and observe. We saw a lot of fish, and the second dive we had out there was at a fun place with lots of holes in the coral and such that you could swim through. We also had an awesome BBQ lunch on the boat, with Heinz ketchup! How I missed that ketchup-here they have “tomato sauce,” which is not the same. After that, we went back to the classroom, and filled out our dive book things and got signed off. We were officially certified! It was an awesome experience, and I am glad that we did it. We are planning on doing at least one more dive with the company-only 40 dollars a day, which is a great deal. We are also doing three dives in Thailand for 120 dollars, where it is a lot warmer, and hopefully we will see some neat stuff. So far we have spent about 2 hours underwater, and are aching for more!
That is pretty much all I have in my brain right now. We have two more weeks of classes left, and everything is winding down. I only have one paper and two presentations left, which is nothing compared to what I had the last week-3 papers, a part of a paper, and a presentation. That’s Australian classes for you! I believe I am doing pretty well grade-wise, but we will see at the end of the semester. I hope everyone is doing well! My next post will probably not be until after Thailand, which is from June 5th through 9th or so.
