Wednesday October 14, 2009: I was never very good with journal writing…

SCUBA Certification Course!
As those of you who actually check this blog know, I haven’t been very good at updating it for oh the last couple months. I know, you want to know what I’m doing, and I am not updating, what is wrong with me? Well I hate writing about what I am doing now, when I haven’t talked about what I’ve already done, I like to keep things in chronological order. Well since I am so behind, I’ve decided, screw it, there’s lots happening with me right now and I want to tell you about it! No worries, I will get back to talking about what’s happened (in particular my trips to Kangaroo Island, Melbourne, Southeast Asia, Perth and the Indian-Pacific across Australia, because I did keep a written journal, I just haven’t transferred it over to the computer yet. I am lazy and hate typing, what can I say? I want one of those programs that I believe exist where you can talk into a computer and it automatically types what you are saying), but right now I will update on what’s been going on since I’ve returned “home” from traveling.

I’ve been planning on heading up to Cairns in northern Queensland to visit my best friend Glynnis’ sister, Meghan, who is studying abroad up there this semester. Well if I am headed up to the Great Barrier Reef area I decided I wasn’t going up there without being able to scuba dive! I had heard that it’s better to get your certification before you go, so went to inquiry with the local dive company here in Huskisson. Unfortunately they want at least 2 people to sign up before they run a course and me being a single and it being off-season, that presented a bit of a problem. There was one other guy signed up to do his open water course over 2 weekends in the beginning of October. Perfect I thought! Sign me up! The shop was going to call back the other guy and get back to me on the specifics. So I went and got my dive medical which was required and started to get psyched. The course dates would allow me get me certification done and head up as planned to Cairns in mid-late October. Luckily I didn’t make any plane reservations… When I still hadn’t heard back a couple days before the course was due to start I headed back in to see what was going on. Liam, who I had been speaking with called the guy then (why hadn’t his been done already is what I wanted to know?) and it turns out the guy had fallen off a veranda and broke his back and leg! So no other person to do a course with, course cancelled. So now I am really bummed. I was told someone else had signed up to do a course at the end of October. Not really going to fit in with my time frame of going to Cairns. I told them I would get back to them. I got in touch with Meghan to find out when she’d be leaving and what her schedule was. Turns out after she travels to Perth in the beginning of November, she is back in Cairns to take a couple exams November 7-14, so if I want to come then, that would work. That actually would be great, since my parents fly in to visit for a few weeks, starting on November 18th. So I head back to the dive shop last week to say yup, sign me up for end of October. Turns out that person was showing interest for an Advanced Open Water Course, grrrr! The person I talked to this day was Julia, who I think is one of the people that runs the shop. She had talked to Liam and knew that I had come in a couple times trying to get into a course. I told her about my predicament (wanting to get the course done so I could go up to the reef the next month and what not) and she said, what the hey, why don’t we just run the course next week with just you and not have to wait for someone else. I was psyched and said, I’m in! Sounds great! So this past Monday I started my SCUBA certification course  I did however get my course book on Wednesday afternoon and had to read the whole thing, answer questions for each of 6 sections and watch a 2 hour DVD and answer 6 pages of questions in 4 days before I started the course. I felt like, I was back in school, answering questions, taking notes, studying. You know what, I kind of liked it. I enjoyed learning new things and it made me think that going back to school might be something I would really enjoy.

I rocked up on Monday morning all ready to begin my course solo and as it turns out someone else had come in a day or 2 after me and wanted to do the course this week, so it turned out to be 2 of us. Crazily enough, I knew the other person! When Tom and I go to the Bowling Club meat raffles on Thursday night, we usually sit with a family, the wife, husband (who isn’t usually there because he travels a lot) and the son and daughter. Turns out it was the 16 year old son who signed up to do the course (since it was the second week of his school holiday). That’s when you know you live in a small community. You run into people you know (even me, who doesn’t know anyone!) everywhere.
Monday morning we did theory and went over our answers to the study book and DVD questions. We also had to watch a few short videos that basically reiterated information we had already learned in both the book and the home-study DVD. We learned how to assemble the gear (the cylinder, the BCD, regulator, etc) then headed over to the indoor pool to do pool skills. We learned how to clear the mask and regulator. How to retrieve lost regulators, how to remove and replace both the weight system and the BCD/cylinder combo. About hovering, descending, ascending, sharing air, hand signals, all the stuff we might need out in the open water. Then at the end, we had to do a 200 meter swim (that’s pretty far, I don’t ever swim 200 meters at one time without stopping, it’s pretty tiring) then after the swim, we had to tread water for 10 minutes, talk about tiring! After getting back to the shop, disassembling the rig and learning how to clean the items, I headed home, utterly exhausted. I think my body was still tired from staying up all night on Saturday night. Yes, you heard me right, I stayed up all night Saturday to listen to the Virginia Tech/Boston College game (GO HOKIES, way to kick the Eagles booty!), which started at 3 am here and lasted till 6 or 6:30 or so. I then got about 4 hours of sleep that morning and took a short nap in the afternoon. So I think Monday when I got back, I was still recovering from my lack of sleep the Saturday before. I had grabbed some chicken and chips on the way home, so I munched on that, then fell asleep for like 3 hours, got up, watched a bit of tv, then went back to sleep for the night.

After all that sleep Monday evening/night, I woke up wide awake and refreshed on Tuesday morning at 7:30 am. Tuesday we were set to do our boat dives, which is unorthodox. Usually you do shore dives first, then move to boat dives, but the shop had a group that was going out for a boat dive on Tuesday so it was easier for us to go when they already had a boat going out. On the way out, we saw some dolphins! My first dolphin sighting in Jervis Bay! We got to our first dive site and headed in the water. Did some skills at the surface, then started to descend. I had some problems when I first tried to descend. I had problems equalizing my ears and they really started to hurt, I felt like my eardrums were going to explode. I was doing the hose pinch/gently blow and nothing! Plus I was a little freaked out. I’ve snorkeled before and the water doesn’t bother me, but when I’ve done that, you can see the bottom, you have some frame of reference. When we started to descend and we couldn’t see the ocean floor or any other physical reference, I must admit, it disoriented me a bit. I had to try and calm myself down. I returned to the surface because of my ears, calmed down and went to try it again. My ears were still hurting when I tried it again and though, man, I’ll never make it down, I wanted to cry it hurts so bad. Then I realized something that helped tremendously. I was forgetting to swallow, and when I did, I could feel my ears pop and boom, so much better. So I just have to remember to swallow and it helps a 1000%. Swallowing is actually harder than it seems. We don’t really realize it, but the air we drive has a certain amount of humidity/moisture in it. The air that the tanks are filled with is dry air. Besides feeling different when breathing it, it also hampers our ability to generate saliva, making it difficult to swallow when you have nothing to swallow. Once I realized though that swallowing helped my equalizing tremendously, I did much better. When we got to the bottom we did more skills. Flooding and clearing the mask, sharing air, buoyancy checks, respirator retrieval, etc. I did see a Port Jackson shark when I was down there which was really neat! We then did our controlled ascent back up to the surface then back to the boat. We had an hour till our next dive and we got bread, crackers and cheese and chicken soup on the boat. When we reached our second dive site and after descending (I did much better this time, although I still had major ear issues. Once you get past that point where it seems like your ears are going to explode and then they pop, it’s actually not bad, you just have to muster past that pain part first) we did more skills. Removing and replacing the weight belt, clearing the mask, swimming around a bit, practicing neutral buoyancy, that sort of thing, before heading back up to the boat. On the way back we spotted some humpback whales at the mouth of the bay. We stopped to watch them. There were at least 2 including a calf. They turned and swam towards out boat right along the coast of Bowen Island (an island at the mouth of Jervis Bay). We watched them swim by the left side of our boat and I was psyched after missing out on seeing any whales when I went on a whale watching cruise in July. So today I saw dolphins, a shark and whales, a pretty darn good day if you ask me! After getting back to the dock we unloaded, disassembled and cleaned our gear.

Wednesday we headed out to Murray’s Beach to do our shore dives. By the way, the water is COLD. About 17°C, that’s about 63°F, which may not seem cold, but trust me, as a water temperature, its freaking freezing. That’s because body heat is lost in water 25 times faster than it is in air. We had on (both yesterday and today) a neoprene undergarment, a hood, a wetsuit, booties, plus the mask, snorkel, fins, weight belt, BCD and cylinder. That’s quite a bit of bulk. We walked into the surf which was difficult. After getting a certain way in we had to put our fins on. I was having issues because my fins didn’t fit well over my booties, plus the waves were a decent size and kept crashing over my darn snorkel tube and I was getting water in my mouth, it was a mess. After doing our descent, we did even more skills. Removing and replacing the BCD/cylinder combo, more buoyancy stuff, making sure we were set on all our basic skills. I did see a lobster type creature (don’t know if it was an actual lobster or an animal that just looked like one) and a bunch of jellyfish, which honestly freaked me out a little bit. Now I though getting in was hard, getting out was even harder. Once I got to a certain point close to the shore, then I had to take the darn fins off, not easy. Then as I was trying to walk out of the surf, on the rocky, uneven ground, the waves were crashing at my back, coupled with the immense weight of the cylinder on my back it kept pushing me forward, causing me to fall onto my hands and knees. When I tried to get up the next wave would crash on me, pushing me forward again. Plus I was trying to hold onto fins with the one hand, which didn’t help my balance. At the end of the second shore dive, I gave up and just threw the fins onto the shore to get rid of them. So those last couples meters to get out of the water, I ended up just literally crawling out of the water. Not the prettiest exit, but it worked, scuffed up my hands on the rocks though, dag nab it. Man getting out of that water into the windy cloudy weather, was FREEZING. We changed out our tanks and decided to hop back in to get the second shore dive of the day over and done with so we change out of our wetsuits and warm up. More problems with the snorkel and getting water in it from the crashing waves, so I said screw it and just popped in the regulator. Did our last skills review and headed back up to get out of that cold water. After heading back to the dive shop and cleaning the gear, it was time for the final exam! 50 questions, of which some were from the home study materials that we hadn’t discussed since Monday, or even at all. Turns out we had to get a 90% to pass! So we were only allowed to miss 5 out of the 50! That’s not too many. Luckily I only missed 4 and I was actually kinda bummed about that. 2 of them, I had the right answer initially and changed it, grr! But still, I passed, yay! The other guys taking the course got 7 wrong, so he had to take the alternate exam, to hopefully pass that one. I left before he finished it, so I don’t know it he did, but I wonder what would have happened if he didn’t. Would he not pass and the last 3 days would have been for naught. I can’t imagine that happening. Funny thing is, he’s dived before, several times. Just has never been certified, actually his dad is a dive instructor himself! Some questions were things that we probably wouldn’t need to know. Like, how often does a cylinder has to by hydrostatically tested? I did know it was every 5 years. But really, in reality, how many people are going to have their own tanks? They would be a pain and difficult to travel with.
Actually in order to get the certification, I have to have done 5 dives. Which leaves me one short. With the course, another shore dive (or is it 2?) is included, but I can upgrade it to 2 boat dives for $85 AU, which is half the cost of a normal boat dive. I think I am going to do that though, get an extra 2 boat dives for half price while I can. The last dive, we don’t have to do any skills, just go for a swim and enjoy the experience. So I can just tag along with a boat going out sometime in the next few weeks before I head to Cairns on the 7th of November (have to buy my ticket tonight!). I figured I would rather do the boat dive then the shore one again, seeing as how I had so much trouble with the entry and exit on the shore with the waves. They do have a boat on Sunday, but that’s not a good day for me. The Virginia Tech/Georgia Tech game is a 6 pm game at home, which means it’s on at 9 am here. Well not on, but I am hoping to be able to find a radio broadcast of the game on the internet, perhaps on the GT student radio section. This is a huge game and I want to be there to listen to or at least watch the gamecast of it. So I decided to just tag along on a boat dive next week or weekend and then I get my certification card! Yay!

Other things that have happened since being back in Huskisson:
- Played in the regional NPL poker final and finished high enough to qualify for the state final for the 3rd time (to be played south of Sydney on Saturday October 17)!
- My parents booked their flights to come visit! They arrive Nov. 18th and are here through Dec. 11th! We are going to spend 5/6 days in Sydney. Come back to Husky for Thanksgiving, head to either Melbourne/Brisbane (they haven’t decided where to go yet) and South Island, New Zealand before heading home. I can’t wait to see them! This has been the longest I have ever gone without seeing them (it’ll have been almost 8 months when they get here). Even when I studied abroad in South Africa, I was only gone for 5 months.