Scuba Diving!

I've been so super busy over the last couple of weeks, especially with a few stressful things happening. I've had 3 very draining calls on the sexual assault crisis line that I volunteer for (two last Sunday and one last night). Then last Tuesday I witnessed a fatal motorcycle accident while on my morning run- a 38 year old man was killed and a 14 year old girl (apparently she wasn't known to the family ??????) was seriously injured. So that was a bit traumatic :(

This past weekend though we took our Open Water Scuba Diving course through PADI! It was so intense and absolutely exhausting. We had 5 confined water dives in a local pool and 5 classroom sessions. We were gone from 6:00-11:00 on Friday, 9:00-7:00 Saturday, and 11:00-7:00 Sunday. I'm not very comfortable in the water, but Dustin is and he really wanted me to take Scuba with him for our trip to Belize in the winter/spring and I really did want to learn so I was determined to successfully complete the course. It was actually very stressful for me, at least for the first 3 or 4 dives. I don't like breathing from my mouth and we needed to demonstrate a bunch of skills for our instructor to prove we could deal with a variety of situations if they arose. Most of the skills I was fine with- like switching from the regulator to a snorkel, or breathing from my buddies alternate air source. But I had a huge amount of trouble with no mask swimming. I naturally inhale a little bit through my nose even with my mask on- which is fine with a mask because there isn't much water in there and it just makes your mask a little uncomfortable. When I had to fill my mask with water and breathe just through my mouth though, I would accidentally inhale a bit of water, which made me cough and panic. It didn't help that I had to keep my eyes closed so I wouldn't lose a contact. Luckily we were able to practice in shallow water so it wasn't a big deal if I surfaced. But later we had to move to the deep end where you couldn't just rush to the surface or risk damaging your ears or lungs. The instructors were great though and a dive master worked with me until I was comfortable with breathing only through my mouth and swimming a short distance underwater, then putting my mask back on and blowing out the water. With his help I was able to successfully complete the skill :) Now we just need to complete our official open water dive in a lake to get certified. I'll have to repeat the no mask swim in the lake, which will be a little more scary (and cold!) but I think I can do it. It was fun though by the end and I'm really looking forward to doing some diving where I can actually see some cool things!