diving

** after days of CLOSING THE TAB ON MYSELF and COMPUTER CRASHING and OTHER CATASTROPHES and SUMMER STUFF, this is finally up!!!

Hey peeps! As probably all of you who follow me regularly have noticed, I've been MIA these past weeks (YEARS)... I don't want to give any excuses, but I'll explain :) does that make sense? So for two weeks, I've been at this ballet camp that is pretty much the whole day and then I have piano, violin, etc. etc. afterwards. And the weekends, well... there's a reason why I created this post!

Through these past two weekends, I was completing my PADI Open Water Diver course... a fancy (fancier) name for a beginner recreational scuba diver.

On the Friday of the first weekend, we had a class. Yep, a classroom class in which we reviewed the manual that we had to read. I tell you, even though it seemed pretty short, it was torture to read through :) especially since I had to cram it all in. On Saturday, we had a morning of class and then headed to the pool for our first dive! Yeah, even though it was in a pool, it was quite enjoyable just to swim around and breathe underwater... without a limit to your depth as with a snorkel. Then on Sunday, we finished the skills in the warm, filtered water. Quite mundane, if I were just to read about it like you, but in truth, it was really quite worth the HUGE weight of the gear.

The second weekend, however, was something that I could have never mentally prepared for. Sure, it may seem small compared to other activities, but I thought that it would be as easy as the previous closed water course. I had to wake up at 5 in the morning. Luckily, I didn't have to do the driving (I can't anyway :D). After eating just a hard boiled egg and drinking some milk, I prepared my gear and wriggled down to the shore, thus beginning the shore dive. There are two types of dives--boat dives and shore dives. Shore dives are harder... Instead of jumping in, one must crawl or walk painfully in until the blessed waves soften the pain of gravity :D The skills that seemed so easy in closed water were hardened by the freezing temperature and my mind seemed as if it were fogged up by the low visibility. When I ended the first dive of the day, I saw stars... kind of... The hood was choking me (a little), and I felt extremely uncomfortable in my wetsuit. Not to mention that I was also dehydrated and nauseous. By the second dive, I felt like I couldn't breathe or move. Luckily, the dive was short, as we only needed to repeat two more skills on that day. My buddy and I were called up early as a few others continued their little tour of Breakwater Pipeline, Monterey.

Sunday was much easier, with only two more skills to do. We had another little tour through the kelp, and we found little decorator crabs, sea hairs, warty sea cucumbers, and much more. After that first quick dive, we planned a dive ourselves with our buddy. We planned to go along the wall to see whatever was there. Guess what? I kinda got lost on that dive :) Anyway, I wasn't planning on seeing some of the creatures we saw down there so close to humans. We saw an ocean sunfish and a tiny octopus. We also saw sea stars (yay! they had a big die-out earlier) and nudibranchs. There was also an array of other flounders, crabs, etc. etc. At the end of the day, I was tired, but happy this time.

Try diving yourself! It's a gorgeous experience :)