sabbath999
Contributor
I am a NOOB from northeastern Missouri. I am, I think, the NOOBist of the NOOBs. Seriously NOOB. Extremely NOOB. NOOBer than most could even imagine...
Last year, my wife (who is uber fit and extremely athletic) decided she wanted to SCUBA, and so this spring she took her PADI Open Water cert courses and passed with flying colors... she's an extremely strong swimmer, smart and with some experience she would be the person that EVERYBODY in their right mind would want as a buddy... smart, steady, careful, detail oriented, organized, strong, fit, and totally unthreatening (for those women out there who are uncomfortable with the idea of meeting up with a man at a lonely isolated place).
We travel together, and we travel a lot. Our "second home" is Kailua-Kona, so you can imagine the possibilities of that.
She loves SCUBA, but she also has a problem... what to do with ME when she is diving.
You see, until 3 weeks ago, I couldn't even swim... at all.
Nada.
Zip.
So about 3 weeks ago I came up with a cunning plan... I would learn to dive and buddy up with her!
Great idea, eh? I thought so.
I went to the our LDS (which, by the way, is 2 hours away.... we are extremely rural in Missouri and signed up for the class, and bought some gear. I wasn't sure I could learn dive but I was pretty sure I could at least learn to snorkel, so I bought some fins that fit, some boots, a snorkel and a mask that fits (I did go ahead and order perscription lenses)... I didn't load up, and I did my price checking before hand to make sure the prices were fair (our LDS is, fortunately, not one of those places that "sees a NOOB coming a mile off" but I was prepared ahead of time with competitive pricing information).
SO... I was all set up, I had my book to read, I had my fins (I still have to resist the urge to call them flippers), and my snorkel. My mask had to be sent off to get the lenses made since it was iffy to start with that I could get them back before cert class due to the 2 week turnaround time...
All ready to go... with one small, very minor detail left to deal with....
I couldn't swim. At all.
My wife told me that I would have to swim 200 meters, and then dogpadle or float for 10 minutes to pass the basic swimming skills test.
200 meters? HOLY COW. 200 meters is a very, very long way for somebody who can't swim.
Enter Thomas. I frantically contacted the nearest public swimming pool, located in a town about 25 miles west of us, and asked about adult private swimming lessons. They hooked me up with Thomas, one of their senior instructors. Thomas called me and we set up an appointment to start on a Tuesday night.... 2 weeks and 2 days before my class.
I met him at the pool, and his words exuded confidence that he could help me pass the test... but his face had this "there's no way we can do this in two weeks" look. He demonstrated two basic strokes, the freestyle and the breaststroke, and we started working on it.
I have not before mentioned that I am a cyclist, and I generally ride 20-35 miles a day every day in the summer. This is my "decompression" time, I NEED to ride my bike to keep me from going mental...
And thus began what I call "The Ordeal".
Here's what my days looked like. Up at 6:00 AM, grab a protein bar, get dressed and hit the bike. Ride until 8:00, shower and go to work (four blocks from home, my workday begins at 8:30).... work until lunch, drive home, change, back on the bike for a quick 10 mile ride, shower, change and then back to work. Skip both morning and evening breaks at work to leave early enough to get in time at the pool. Hop in the car and drive 25 miles (slamming down a couple PB&J sandwiches on the way) and hitting the pool from 5:30-6:45 (when it closes).
First, I would float for 10:00 minutes, then I would go and start the laps. At first, I could go only half a length of the 25 meter pool before gasping and sputtering the 44 gallons of water I injested during my "swim". On day 3, I made it one complete length of the pool! WOW, I was the next Michael Phelps, baby...
I would take lessons after the pool closed every other day, until 8:00. The biggest trouble I had was how to breath, so my instructor decided to have me just forget about breathing and use my snorkel. I bought a pair of Speedo swimming goggles, attached the snorkel to it, put my face down in the water and concentrated on learning the strokes. I breathed in through the snorkel and out through my nose, slowed down and just went stroke after stroke. (This actually helped my in several ways when it came to my pool skills, but I didn't realize that it would at the time).
Week 2 was all about breathing and teaching my muscle memory on the strokes, and I gradually figured it out. By the end of the second week, I could swim up to 16 lengths of the pool (twice what was needed for my test) and float on my back indefinitely. I learned the basic backstroke, and it was actually a lot more fun to do than the others. I was slow... and I mean SLOW... but SCUBA isn't an olympic event, so slow doesn't matter much.
On to class. I sat through the classes, and we took our quizzes. I missed one question the entire time because I was a moron and filled in the wrong box on something I knew the answer to. No need to go through that stuff with y'all, it's really pretty simple.
After doing 8 hours or so of bookwork and videos over an evening and a morning, we went to the pool.
HERE is where all of my hard work would either pay off, or I would flunk out... pretty simple really.
I looked around at the other 9 students left (we had one person drop out before the pool... she was struggling with the bookwork big-time and I think had other concerns... not my worry). We started with the 200 meter swim.
As I slowly lumbered off in my steady, glacial style, I looked over and saw that I was in the pool with 9 members of the US Olympic Swim Team (apparently). I mean it was insane how fast some of those people were. By the time I got back from lap 2 all but 2 were finished. By the time I touched on the other side for lap 3 I was the only person in the pool still swimming. As I swam back, everybody but the instructor who was watching me (an extremely conciencous ex-military type who let ABSOLUTELY NOTHING get past him the entire weekend) and I thought I was on my last lap. Not so, back across the pool I went with the entire building's set of eyes on me.
Sounds embarassing, right?
NOT! Not to me anyways... I was going at my own pace, I was in control, I wasn't breathing hard or over exerting myself, I was within my limits and comfortable. Yes, I was by far the slowest swimmer there, but I could keep up what I was doing literally for hours at a time. I could have swam MILES at that pace, in control and in comfort.
Second came the 10 minutes of staying afloat. Since I found that with a full chest of air I can float comfortably, this was not at all an issue for me... however, a bunch of those "fish" who totally smoked me on the swimming part of it were really having trouble doing this... I watched as three or four were paddling desperately to keep up, and they were completely winded at the end of it.
Hrmmmm......
I am 6'3 and I was buddied up with an amazing 13 year old very atheletic (and very mature) young man. I was clumsy (I had only had my fins on once before, for about 10 minutes, a major mistake as it turns out) but not helpless. I had 22 pounds of weight on, a 3 mil wetsuit with no legs, a scubapro vest BCD with AIR2 (the standard shop rental gear) and my prescription goggles (which arrived the day of the pool training, thank goodness!).
We (my buddy and I) did fine through all of the first skills, no issues to speak of. The first problem I had... and in fact the only REAL problem I had throughout the entire skills tests... was absolutely totally stupid. Regulator recovery, where I reach back behind my head and grab the hose at the First Stage... well, it turns out that somebody with extremely short arms (I have very short arms and legs for somebody my size) isn't very well adapted to doing this. I just about had to dislocate my shoulder to pass this skill (yes, I was raising the BCD, the tank, everything).
I also struggled taking off and putting on the weight belt under water, but eventually I got that figured out. When I get my own equipment, the one thing I am sure of is that I am going to get an integrated weight system!
The REAL problem I had on day one was equalization. MAN I wish that I had seen DandyDon's Equalizing Video before my class. My instructors explained equalizing to us, but I guess I was just being an idiot or something and not paying attention. I couldn't equalize because I was starting when I started to feel the pressure at 4 feet. By the time I got down to 6 or 7 feet, I (of course stupidly and wrongly) was trying to just blow harder.
Since they were not taking us down in the deep end that day (they were just giving us a feel for what it was like, the deep end stuff was done on the next dive) I got a chance to talk to my wife (a certified diver, and a college professor of physiology) and my experienced instructors. After consultation, we figured out that I simply was starting too late. The next day, I found out that, indeed, this was the problem. I equalized on the surface using Valsalva, and every two feet... I descended head up and had absolutely zero problems the second day.
After talking to my fellow students I got the impression that three of them were also having problems, but they went ahead and just sucked it up whereas I stopped and went back up (not far enough, just back to four feet) and tried to clear... when that didn't work I aborted. I think everybody had it figured out by the second day.
The second last two dive's skills all were no problem (I made it all the way across the pool on one long AHHHHHHH..... exhale during the emergency ascent practice, much to my and my drill sgt.'s surprise) for me.
Turns out that things like breathing with no mask on and mask clearing were cake for me, after learning how to swim with my face in the water and no mask to start with.
When I was done, I passed the pool with no issues. I don't want to single anybody out who may read this and was in my class, but I can say that at least two of the strong swimmers who I was with didn't, and have to reschedule further work in the pool to pass. I felt really good about the fact that my instructors who were able to pass me on all of the skills that I needed to pass were paying extremely close attention to what I was doing and were stopping everybody when they did something wrong and remediating the situation. There's no way past the guy who was training my group except for succeeding at the skill multiple times before his own eyes. That's quite a confidence builder, letting me know that indeed I was doing it the right way and doing it successfully.
Back to the classroom. The Dive Tables were next, and although I hated every minute of it, I got it OK. I ended up getting a 92 on the test. One question I mismarked (I indeed know that things are more buoyant in salt water... sheesh), one I flat didn't know (you are supposed to get your tanks visually inspected every year), one I did the math wrong (the triple dive table one) and one I would argue that my answer was just as right as theirs (bottom composition does affect currents, when that bottom is composed of lava flows like you would see at Kona). Not all of my classmates passed the book learning, either... and were going to have to retest.
So now I am on to open water. I plan to do that next month.
Yay for me, right?
Well... not so fast. The LDS encourages anybody who wants to go back to the pool at any time that there is training going on to work on their skills, and there are several more sessions planned this year before I plan on doing my first "real" dive in Kona in December (I am in Missouri right now). Since one person dropped out of my class before the pool, we had an odd number of people so my wife volunteered to go through the entire pool training process as somebody's buddy (the father of my buddy was who she was assigned... he was certified but hadn't dived in 20 years so was doing the course over again).
My swimming skills are WAY below where they need to be, and I need to get better at EVERYTHING before I become a safe and dependable buddy for my wife.
I have come a long way in 3 weeks, but I am definitely not where I need to be on my skill set... so it is back to the pool for me to work on EVERYTHING. I am going to offer to do what my wife did, if they have an odd number again next time, and go through the entire pool work over again to improve my limited skill-set.
I may not be very strong skill wise, but I recognize that and refuse to accept that as a long term plan. Skills are things that can be improved with hard work, and if nothing else I can work hard.
So there you have my extremely long winded story of how a person can go from completely unable to swim to ready for open water training in two weeks and 4 days.
Thanks to my wife for her support, to Thomas for his instruction and encouragement, and to the LDS for understanding my limitations and helping me learn to work past them.
Last year, my wife (who is uber fit and extremely athletic) decided she wanted to SCUBA, and so this spring she took her PADI Open Water cert courses and passed with flying colors... she's an extremely strong swimmer, smart and with some experience she would be the person that EVERYBODY in their right mind would want as a buddy... smart, steady, careful, detail oriented, organized, strong, fit, and totally unthreatening (for those women out there who are uncomfortable with the idea of meeting up with a man at a lonely isolated place).
We travel together, and we travel a lot. Our "second home" is Kailua-Kona, so you can imagine the possibilities of that.
She loves SCUBA, but she also has a problem... what to do with ME when she is diving.
You see, until 3 weeks ago, I couldn't even swim... at all.
Nada.
Zip.
So about 3 weeks ago I came up with a cunning plan... I would learn to dive and buddy up with her!
Great idea, eh? I thought so.
I went to the our LDS (which, by the way, is 2 hours away.... we are extremely rural in Missouri and signed up for the class, and bought some gear. I wasn't sure I could learn dive but I was pretty sure I could at least learn to snorkel, so I bought some fins that fit, some boots, a snorkel and a mask that fits (I did go ahead and order perscription lenses)... I didn't load up, and I did my price checking before hand to make sure the prices were fair (our LDS is, fortunately, not one of those places that "sees a NOOB coming a mile off" but I was prepared ahead of time with competitive pricing information).
SO... I was all set up, I had my book to read, I had my fins (I still have to resist the urge to call them flippers), and my snorkel. My mask had to be sent off to get the lenses made since it was iffy to start with that I could get them back before cert class due to the 2 week turnaround time...
All ready to go... with one small, very minor detail left to deal with....
I couldn't swim. At all.
My wife told me that I would have to swim 200 meters, and then dogpadle or float for 10 minutes to pass the basic swimming skills test.
200 meters? HOLY COW. 200 meters is a very, very long way for somebody who can't swim.
Enter Thomas. I frantically contacted the nearest public swimming pool, located in a town about 25 miles west of us, and asked about adult private swimming lessons. They hooked me up with Thomas, one of their senior instructors. Thomas called me and we set up an appointment to start on a Tuesday night.... 2 weeks and 2 days before my class.
I met him at the pool, and his words exuded confidence that he could help me pass the test... but his face had this "there's no way we can do this in two weeks" look. He demonstrated two basic strokes, the freestyle and the breaststroke, and we started working on it.
I have not before mentioned that I am a cyclist, and I generally ride 20-35 miles a day every day in the summer. This is my "decompression" time, I NEED to ride my bike to keep me from going mental...
And thus began what I call "The Ordeal".
Here's what my days looked like. Up at 6:00 AM, grab a protein bar, get dressed and hit the bike. Ride until 8:00, shower and go to work (four blocks from home, my workday begins at 8:30).... work until lunch, drive home, change, back on the bike for a quick 10 mile ride, shower, change and then back to work. Skip both morning and evening breaks at work to leave early enough to get in time at the pool. Hop in the car and drive 25 miles (slamming down a couple PB&J sandwiches on the way) and hitting the pool from 5:30-6:45 (when it closes).
First, I would float for 10:00 minutes, then I would go and start the laps. At first, I could go only half a length of the 25 meter pool before gasping and sputtering the 44 gallons of water I injested during my "swim". On day 3, I made it one complete length of the pool! WOW, I was the next Michael Phelps, baby...
I would take lessons after the pool closed every other day, until 8:00. The biggest trouble I had was how to breath, so my instructor decided to have me just forget about breathing and use my snorkel. I bought a pair of Speedo swimming goggles, attached the snorkel to it, put my face down in the water and concentrated on learning the strokes. I breathed in through the snorkel and out through my nose, slowed down and just went stroke after stroke. (This actually helped my in several ways when it came to my pool skills, but I didn't realize that it would at the time).
Week 2 was all about breathing and teaching my muscle memory on the strokes, and I gradually figured it out. By the end of the second week, I could swim up to 16 lengths of the pool (twice what was needed for my test) and float on my back indefinitely. I learned the basic backstroke, and it was actually a lot more fun to do than the others. I was slow... and I mean SLOW... but SCUBA isn't an olympic event, so slow doesn't matter much.
On to class. I sat through the classes, and we took our quizzes. I missed one question the entire time because I was a moron and filled in the wrong box on something I knew the answer to. No need to go through that stuff with y'all, it's really pretty simple.
After doing 8 hours or so of bookwork and videos over an evening and a morning, we went to the pool.
HERE is where all of my hard work would either pay off, or I would flunk out... pretty simple really.
I looked around at the other 9 students left (we had one person drop out before the pool... she was struggling with the bookwork big-time and I think had other concerns... not my worry). We started with the 200 meter swim.
As I slowly lumbered off in my steady, glacial style, I looked over and saw that I was in the pool with 9 members of the US Olympic Swim Team (apparently). I mean it was insane how fast some of those people were. By the time I got back from lap 2 all but 2 were finished. By the time I touched on the other side for lap 3 I was the only person in the pool still swimming. As I swam back, everybody but the instructor who was watching me (an extremely conciencous ex-military type who let ABSOLUTELY NOTHING get past him the entire weekend) and I thought I was on my last lap. Not so, back across the pool I went with the entire building's set of eyes on me.
Sounds embarassing, right?
NOT! Not to me anyways... I was going at my own pace, I was in control, I wasn't breathing hard or over exerting myself, I was within my limits and comfortable. Yes, I was by far the slowest swimmer there, but I could keep up what I was doing literally for hours at a time. I could have swam MILES at that pace, in control and in comfort.
Second came the 10 minutes of staying afloat. Since I found that with a full chest of air I can float comfortably, this was not at all an issue for me... however, a bunch of those "fish" who totally smoked me on the swimming part of it were really having trouble doing this... I watched as three or four were paddling desperately to keep up, and they were completely winded at the end of it.
Hrmmmm......
I am 6'3 and I was buddied up with an amazing 13 year old very atheletic (and very mature) young man. I was clumsy (I had only had my fins on once before, for about 10 minutes, a major mistake as it turns out) but not helpless. I had 22 pounds of weight on, a 3 mil wetsuit with no legs, a scubapro vest BCD with AIR2 (the standard shop rental gear) and my prescription goggles (which arrived the day of the pool training, thank goodness!).
We (my buddy and I) did fine through all of the first skills, no issues to speak of. The first problem I had... and in fact the only REAL problem I had throughout the entire skills tests... was absolutely totally stupid. Regulator recovery, where I reach back behind my head and grab the hose at the First Stage... well, it turns out that somebody with extremely short arms (I have very short arms and legs for somebody my size) isn't very well adapted to doing this. I just about had to dislocate my shoulder to pass this skill (yes, I was raising the BCD, the tank, everything).
I also struggled taking off and putting on the weight belt under water, but eventually I got that figured out. When I get my own equipment, the one thing I am sure of is that I am going to get an integrated weight system!
The REAL problem I had on day one was equalization. MAN I wish that I had seen DandyDon's Equalizing Video before my class. My instructors explained equalizing to us, but I guess I was just being an idiot or something and not paying attention. I couldn't equalize because I was starting when I started to feel the pressure at 4 feet. By the time I got down to 6 or 7 feet, I (of course stupidly and wrongly) was trying to just blow harder.
Since they were not taking us down in the deep end that day (they were just giving us a feel for what it was like, the deep end stuff was done on the next dive) I got a chance to talk to my wife (a certified diver, and a college professor of physiology) and my experienced instructors. After consultation, we figured out that I simply was starting too late. The next day, I found out that, indeed, this was the problem. I equalized on the surface using Valsalva, and every two feet... I descended head up and had absolutely zero problems the second day.
After talking to my fellow students I got the impression that three of them were also having problems, but they went ahead and just sucked it up whereas I stopped and went back up (not far enough, just back to four feet) and tried to clear... when that didn't work I aborted. I think everybody had it figured out by the second day.
The second last two dive's skills all were no problem (I made it all the way across the pool on one long AHHHHHHH..... exhale during the emergency ascent practice, much to my and my drill sgt.'s surprise) for me.
Turns out that things like breathing with no mask on and mask clearing were cake for me, after learning how to swim with my face in the water and no mask to start with.
When I was done, I passed the pool with no issues. I don't want to single anybody out who may read this and was in my class, but I can say that at least two of the strong swimmers who I was with didn't, and have to reschedule further work in the pool to pass. I felt really good about the fact that my instructors who were able to pass me on all of the skills that I needed to pass were paying extremely close attention to what I was doing and were stopping everybody when they did something wrong and remediating the situation. There's no way past the guy who was training my group except for succeeding at the skill multiple times before his own eyes. That's quite a confidence builder, letting me know that indeed I was doing it the right way and doing it successfully.
Back to the classroom. The Dive Tables were next, and although I hated every minute of it, I got it OK. I ended up getting a 92 on the test. One question I mismarked (I indeed know that things are more buoyant in salt water... sheesh), one I flat didn't know (you are supposed to get your tanks visually inspected every year), one I did the math wrong (the triple dive table one) and one I would argue that my answer was just as right as theirs (bottom composition does affect currents, when that bottom is composed of lava flows like you would see at Kona). Not all of my classmates passed the book learning, either... and were going to have to retest.
So now I am on to open water. I plan to do that next month.
Yay for me, right?
Well... not so fast. The LDS encourages anybody who wants to go back to the pool at any time that there is training going on to work on their skills, and there are several more sessions planned this year before I plan on doing my first "real" dive in Kona in December (I am in Missouri right now). Since one person dropped out of my class before the pool, we had an odd number of people so my wife volunteered to go through the entire pool training process as somebody's buddy (the father of my buddy was who she was assigned... he was certified but hadn't dived in 20 years so was doing the course over again).
My swimming skills are WAY below where they need to be, and I need to get better at EVERYTHING before I become a safe and dependable buddy for my wife.
I have come a long way in 3 weeks, but I am definitely not where I need to be on my skill set... so it is back to the pool for me to work on EVERYTHING. I am going to offer to do what my wife did, if they have an odd number again next time, and go through the entire pool work over again to improve my limited skill-set.
I may not be very strong skill wise, but I recognize that and refuse to accept that as a long term plan. Skills are things that can be improved with hard work, and if nothing else I can work hard.
So there you have my extremely long winded story of how a person can go from completely unable to swim to ready for open water training in two weeks and 4 days.
Thanks to my wife for her support, to Thomas for his instruction and encouragement, and to the LDS for understanding my limitations and helping me learn to work past them.
You sound like you will do just fine and will enjoy diving. Never worry about being the slowest swimmer my dive buddy would testify that I could not get any slower from suiting up to swimming. Enjoy!
