It’s official! Steve and I are now certified scuba divers. We completed our open water training on April 12th and embarked on our first solo dive last Saturday morning. With 5 dives under our belt, our adventures in diving have just begun.
Becoming a certified diver isn’t hard. It just takes some course work, a few skills tests, a final exam, and a couple hundred bucks. The course work basically covers the physics of what happens to your body under pressure, along with how to be safe and avoid injury, while the skills tests prepare you for possible situations you might encounter while in the water. Included in the underwater skills we had to master were sharing air, emergency ascents, and removing/swimming without a mask, which was, by far, the most intimidating for me. I’m not sure why that is. Even though you get to keep breathing with your regulator the entire time, your first instinct, it seems, when you remove your mask underwater is to inhale through your nose. I’ve inhaled a lot of water over the past few weeks, but it’s all been worth it to discover this exciting new underwater world we get to explore.
Diving has become fascinating to me. I’ll admit that the first few times I went diving I wasn’t that excited about it. It wasn’t until our third or fourth dive, when a sea turtle swam up to us and followed us for a swim, that I became hooked. It’s crazy how much life is happening underwater that you never get to see when you’re just splashing around on the surface. Just in our few short dives we’ve seen sea turtles, lobsters, pufferfish, lionfish, dozens of cushion starfish, a stingray, an octopus, a barracuda, a school of tarpon, as well as hundreds of other fish and corals. And that’s just under the Frederiksted pier. I can’t wait to see what the other 50+ dive sites on St. Croix have to offer!
My interest in diving extends beyond just the sea life in the Caribbean. I want to dive shipwrecks, and it just so happens that my home state of Michigan offers some of the best shipwreck diving in the world. According to this article, “Michigan ranks among the top 10 states in the number of certified divers and is considered world class for wrecks.” And since the ships sunk in cold, fresh water, many are perfectly preserved. Although it requires special training to dive in the cold water of the Great Lakes, I’m still super excited to check it out next time I’m back in town. Yet another reason to travel back home more often.
April 24, 2017 at 9:35 pm
Congrats! Looks like a blast. How often do you have to stop on the way up for a decompression break? It’s a trivia question!