Day 2: My second day was at the seawall, the same location as the first day so naturally I was nervous. I knew how to scuba dive but now the trick was doing it in the open water which was daunting. I didn't realize how afraid I was of the unknown in the ocean until I was faced with having to go out into it. Before we began our dive we planned our dive, we determined how long and to what depth we would go to. The girl I met from the Netherlands told me we would do that so I studied up on it and felt like I did well on that part. We assembled our gear, did a buddy check and headed out to the water. I kept telling myself to remain calm. Things were different this time, I knew what to expect and I was able to get my mask not to fog up and to fit my face better so as we swam to the location where we were going to descend so I wasn't as distracted as the previous time. We started to descend at the same place we did the first day and as we started I put my thumbs up to go back to the surface. I told her I was scared and nervous, she told me not to be and that we would be diving at a very shallow depth. We tried again and I did it, we sank to the bottom of the ocean. We did skills first, we lost the regulator and retrieved it (mouth piece), cleared our mask, and did the scariest thing, took off our mask and put it back on. I still hate doing that and doing it in the deep (to me) ocean for the first time was a vulnerable experience. Once that was done we went and explored, the purpose of this dive was learning to control buoyancy. We went out into the ocean 2 times this day. The first time I was pretty nervous and overwhelmed. The second time I think was my most enjoyable dive out of all of the dives I did in the course. I'm afraid of heights and when I am up high I don't like to look down, as went went deeper into the ocean it made me nauseous to look up. I had to keep looking forward, it freaked me out too much to know exactly how deep I was. This is because you can't just bail, you cannot ascend any faster than 30 feet/min or you risk decompression sickness, damaging your lungs, ears, and nasal cavities. Knowing this I had troubles being cool with going down into the ocean but eventually became use to it and trusted the information I learned in the academic portion that the odds of something bad happening were very low. The wild life I saw on my first dive I would ease away from it, on my second dive I tried to be more adventurous and get as close to it as my instructor did. We saw a tiger fish which can be poisonous and an octopus in an opening which was a bit out of my comfort zone, my instructor tried to get me to come closer to get a better view but I wasn't having any of that. We also saw Nemo and several other colorful fish. I was content with having them around. She also showed me a Shisa dog (Japanese statue) which was random and a neat find. After this day, I was so happy I could have cried. I said many thank you prayers on the way home and couldn't stop smiling. Even if I did horrible on my 3rd day and didn't pass the course I at least scuba dived on this day and for me that seemed like a huge accomplishment.
Day 3: My instructor told me we would work on navigation this day. I was really nervous about this as it was something I couldn't really go home and practice before hand. There were 2 other young men in my class. Diving in a larger group is tricky. I think I kicked one of these guys in the face at least once...... I totally tried verbally apologizing underwater without thinking about it, The first time Sean took me snorkeling we went to the edge of the coral reef like in Nemo where they referred to it as the "dropoff" It was really overwhelming the first time to see it just snorkeling. Well on the dives we did this day we didn't just look at it from the surface we went over it and sank to the ocean floor. It took me a while to get my ears to equalize. As we started to descend it felt harder to breathe, I'm not sure if that was my mind playing tricks on me or if it really was harder to do as we began our descent. It's a bit of multitasking to remember to breathe through your regulator, but plug your nose and try to get your ears to equalize. When it finally happened we were able to move on. We were the deepest I had been yet, and we had to do all over our skills again. Loosing and retrieving the regulator was easy, the taking off the mask part was still scary and I'm not sure if that is something I will ever be comfortable with, but it was my lasts time having to prove that I could do it so that felt awesome! The last dive I saw an octopus it was just in a small crevice and I could just see it's eyes, on this dive we saw a full blown octopus creeping along the coral, tentacles and all and then find a place to hide, he was also pretty big, larger than the length of my torso. We also saw an eel, he looked aggressive to me but everyone else seemed to be really excited about him. We worked on navigation, so I learned how to use an underwater compass, I swam in one direction and then had to swim in a straight line back the same way that I came. I didn't do very good the first time and had to try again, the compass takes some time to balance and I wasn't patient with it my first time, my second time I did fine. I passed navigation on the first dive for this day, on the second dive I needed to watch the dive computer and pay attention to how long we have been underwater and how deep we were going. This was fairly easy. On this dive we swam along the side of the coral drop off. It was really spectacular. This is going to sound really cliche but it's like a completely different world. The sea wall was the first place we visited when I arrived on Okinawa and I never imagined that there could be so much beauty under the water. This was a hard thing for me to do, as you can tell I was a big baby throughout most of this experience but I still loved being able to do it. I love the ocean and now my wanderlust has increased ten fold because now there are places I want to travel to just to scuba dive there. Oh, and I officially became a certified scuba diver this day! I will be posting videos of some of the skills required to pass the course at the bottom of this post, things I wish I would have known before signing up that would have given me some idea of what to expect and what I was getting myself into.
I didn't get any pictures of the actual day, but here is the location we dived. This was our first day in Okinawa and I never imagined that I would dive here almost exactly a year later.
Taking the mask off under water and clearing it.
Regulator retrieval
Rescue Diving (not the best video but you get the idea)
There are more skills such as equipment assembly and such, these were the 3 that made me the most nervous. If I can do it so can you! If this is something you have been wanting to do go for it!
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