:dazzler1:
I love diving! :dazzler1:
Ok. Here goes.
I was in the afternoon class but decided to get out there a little early to watch some of the other groups. The morning class had run into a few snags and was running late so I had a chance to talk to everyone during their surface interval. They had 2 people "panic" during the mask clearing. That was my weak spot so I wasn't overjoyed to hear that. One of them decided to stay and try again with our group and did fine. The other opted for some more pool time first. This all worked out well and gave us an even 10 divers, no including instructor and DMs. We swam out to the float marking the platform we were going to use and formed up. They were going to take us down 2 at a time and guess who was first... Yup. Me and my buddy. I took a deep breath to calm myself, vented air, exhaled and down I went. The water was cold but not bad at 64 deg. down to about 20'. We got to the platform and kneeled on the ledge. I did a quick guage check and HOLY COW! 500psi of air gone already. I know some of it was because of the cool water and the hot fill but still... I concentrated on my breathing a bit and minute by minute I started to get less and less floaty and settled in while the rest of the group came down. I started noticing all of the fish. This is really cool. We went through the basic skills and none of us had any problems. The instructor shook our hand and paired us up with a DM for a little site seeing. This is where this buoyancy control stuff I kept hearing everyone talking about hit me and I realized that some of that would be really nice right about now. I was constantly just off the bottom, stirring up my share of muck, while my buddy kept floating up. I was pretty much keeping pace with the DM but I had to keep stopping and looking back for my buddy. I never let him get more than about 10 feet away but I kind of wished he'd keep up. I reminded myself that at least he wasn't on the bottom like I was and probably felt like he was better able to keep me in his sight if he was above and behind. I played a bit with adding air to the BCD and got up in the water a bit just as it was time to turn and go back. It wasn't intentional on the DMs part, but I got to see first hand what I had kicked up. It wasn't horrid, but I became much more aware after that. We made our way to the rock crusher and then followed the line back to the ramp. I ended the dive with right at 400psi. I was the group airhog. (being out of shape and smoking didn't help a bit I'm sure..working on both btw)
The first words out of my mouth after I surfaced was, "Life is good!" I guess it was louder than I thought because several divers on shore asked if I was the guy that enjoyed myself so much out there.
During our SIT I got everyone to agree to hang out after we were done to all go for dinner together, which we did. I think we had as much fun there as we did in the water. It's a good group. As this is getting pretty long I'll just say that the second dive went very well but I know several things I really need to work on. The first is going to be ascent rate. I looked at my computer while we were eating and every ascent was too fast. I'll get it. We have 2 more dives tomorrow and if all goes well, which I expect it will, severalof us have talked about going out again next weekend. Then there are the millions of dives I'll be doing after that.
Thanks for the well wishes. Tomorrow I'll be a card carrying, honest to goodness diver. One with a lot to learn but I look forward to every lesson.
Joe
