Day 1 of Scuba Cert over! Some things worth repeating:
- You have to be able to tread water for 10 minutes straight with no breaks or hanging on to anything. They say it’s the hardest thing to do out of the whole certification and they are right, at least for me, being that I am the least physically fit person in the world. Took me 3 tries. We did the tread test first, and I could’nt finish so I had to do the rest of the routine first and then try to complete it at the end, two more times. If I didn’t pass it then I wouldn’t have been able to do the second part tomorrow. Would have been a really bad ego hit.
- You have to pee in your wetsuit. I held it but wow.
- You have to some otherwise scary things like see what it feels like when you’re out of air underwater (instructor turns off your air supply and you watch your air pressure gague go down, down, down…) and you have to breathe through your regulator for 1 minute without goggles on (keeping in mind that goggles protect your nose, so it’s pretty crazy.)
- We’re getting certs for ‘deep water diving..’ scuba certs only allow for shallow, I guess we can go up to 130 feet eventually (with more dive hours)… after that you need to get technical certs which are like re-breathers and crazy science shit.
My game-designy head was enjoying the learning experience. A lot of what you prepare to deal with in the education is both disaster and how to deal with panic. I want to play with some ideas involving panic meters, air meters, etc…
At the end of it all, people have been scuba diving for 50 years. What scuba divers do is very similar to astronauts, in many ways, especially deep sea diving. It’s pretty marvelous how we can visit places we weren’t really meant to be, still be so comfortable.
Lots of endorphins, lots of adrenaline, lots of excitement. Really exhausted and actually a bit concerned about my cardio, but glad to have been given a practical opportunity to see it not work out so I can get my lazy ass to do something about it.
Tired and hungry so going to award ourselves with In N Out and then relax. Really swimming with the fishies tomorrow!
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