[Scuba]

One of my passions is Scuba Diving.  I LOVE how relaxed I am under the water.  Its like flying... but not really.  You're practically weightless, with a sky above you and the ground below, and you can go any direction you want. Up, down, left, right. You're in a full 3d environment. 

We went to Hawaii last year.   In prep for that, I suggested we do scuba classes, and then we could go diving off of the coast.  Great idea right?  

My first time under the water was terrifying.  I'm someone who likes to breathe through my nose. And in the case with scuba, your entire nose is covered with a mask. (This is to keep pressure on your eyes and stuff.  If you start getting a head ache, you breath through your nose, decreasing the pressure in your sinuses. ) I couldn't breathe anymore, I was only a  foot underwater, and I couldn't tune my brain into breath through my mouth when I went under.  I shot back up to the surface, and ashamed felt like crying.  The instructor came to the surface and told me to take a deep breath and that i would be ok. Cory came back to the surface to check on me and we went under again. This time, I flipped out again, but grabbed hold of his hand where he held me down there with my eyes closed while I learned to breathe through my mouth. 

There were several things to learn.  First off, the symbol i'm making in this picture is one that states that I'm ok... its also used as a question. You would make this towards someone else asking if they're ok. When you jump in the water you make this symbol.  When Cory and I went down to the wreck dive, I was asked this probably a hundred times..(every time I was perfectly fine though). 


There's something relaxing about swimming in almost silence, with the sound of bubbles in your ears.  I'll post a non-informative video or 2 at the end here, so you can get used to the sound.  


When I say you can go left right up down, I mean it. I did flips and twists and turns, and sank and rose... 

One of the buoyant tests we had to do was to be upside down for a while.  Because gravity is affected differently under the water, blood doesn't rush to your head.  In fact, if you're exploring the ocean floor, your feet need to be above you so you don't kick up silt and junk from the ground.  This is the normal position most people are in when they go diving.   

Once upon a time, the squad went swimming. Or was planning on it, and me being the photo freak that I am, was tired of leaving the camera behind when we went to the pool, so I ordered myself an underwater housing for my lumix.  

  

I've decided I LOVE taking pictures underwater more than above. There's so much more involved in it. Besides the fact you have to stay buoyant, you have to stay still in the currents, and there's practically no color 20 feet below the surface.

So. Anyway. We went to Hawaii.  We did a wreck dive, and then a standard 30-50 foot dive.  (You can only be under the water for a certain amount of time. ) Your body builds up nitrogen, and processes it on a daily basis. When you're under a lot of pressure... like more than 40 ft under the water, your body doesn't process it as well, and you get nitrogen bubbles in your blood.  If you come up too fast, the nitrogen gets caught in your blood and body, and you get Decompression Sickness or "the bends" and you can die. Usually if you get "the bends", they stick you in a high pressure chamber similar to the pressure of being under water and slowly let the nitrogen dissolve.  Its an expensive procedure. 

Pretty much you have limited time down there. Either you get too much nitrogen in your blood, or you run out of air. 

When I went under for the first time in the ocean, it was overwhelming.  Usually you see sky, ground, mountains, horizon. There was NOTHING. Just blue EVERYWHERE.  I had a bit of a flip out, mostly because I was unprepared for this.   They have buoys set up with ropes that go down to the wreck, and so that the divers don't get vertigo, (which i got several times going down by myself) You follow the rope down.  Once I was able to get ahold of myself, we went down. 

So. One of the things we were warned about before going down, was that the color red disappears very quickly.  At 105 ft, which is where the wreck was, Red was definitely gone.  I moved along to the wreck, and actually let out more air than I was supposed to and started sinking really fast. I grabbed ahold of the railing, which was covered in rust, and yanked my hand away. I had cut it.  But it wasn't blood I was seeing exiting the wound. It looked like algae. Green algae. I was bleeding, but it was green, and that's cause red is non-existent at that level. 

Probably the coolest thing I saw down there was an eel and an octopus fighting on the deck.  The octopus was just minding its own business, when the eel came out of nowhere and they started fighting till they wandered deep into the wreck where we couldn't follow.   

Sea turtles in hawaii are also endangered, and you're not allowed to touch them...  

When we went down for our 2nd dive of the day, this is where the cool stuff started happening.  I wasn't able to take my camera down during the wreck dive. There was moisture in there somewhere, and it was fogging up the housing. On the 2nd dive, I figured out where the moisture was and was able to go in with it.  

We found a pleathora of under sea creatures, but my favorite was the octopus that our guide found us, AND allowed us to hold. 

The reason you can see red in these pictures is because I did some white balancing after we came up. the red showed up with some post editing. 

Here is a totally and completely useless video of me trying to get my BCD back on during training.  Some days, when i'm anxious, I'll turn this video on and listen to the noise it makes.

This is another cool video.  Its a murky environmental video...

Now that I can scuba dive, what are my plans?  I aspire to be an underwater photographer. I'm saving money for my underwater housing and lenses for my Nikon D5000, and taking classes.  I also plan to become a dive master... someday. (They can make lots of money :)  )