Coral Grand Divers
(that’s me all the way on the right with the baby bird legs)
So my friend from Shanghai, Mel, moved to Koh Tao, Thailand as she is a Dive Master. Upset at her move, I booked tickets to visit as soon as I could to not only see my gal pal, but to escape the gloom and doom of Shanghai. Talk about a tasteful treat, Thailand was not at all disappointing.
When your friends dive, you dive
So as the photo above gives away, I ended up getting my Open Water Scuba Diving certification. I had gone diving a couple of times before but each time was one of those “discover diving” half-hour courses that now looking back at it, were pretty unsafe. I went into the trip thinking I would just do a couple of these with Mel but after weighing out the price of the sketchy dives with the whole course, I ended up in the course at Mel’s dive shop. Let me tell you, if you are ever trying to decide between the two, just take the course because you will feel so much safer and confident. Before this experience, I walked around thinking “why would I pay for a scuba certification when I can still dive without it?” I am openly eating my words because learning how to dive in a proper course was incredibly rewarding. I learned how to set up and work all of my gear, practiced underwater situations such as not having a mask, how to change regulators and so on. All together, I honestly felt wayyyyy better about diving having learned all of that rather than being 18m under water with little to no situation practice.
“Go deep, Get wrecked”
So diving sounds scary right? The first few things that you learn include:
A) your lungs can explode
B) you can’t touch anything because you’ll harm the environment
C) you can’t touch anything because it’ll harm you
I mean it’s not THAT discouraging, people still dive all the time. It’s just important to do it safely and have an instructor that isn’t some cool island prick trying to get into your pants because you’re a “NBO” (next boat out) island tourist. I think everyone should learn from a James, this innuendo filled British batty man with great experience and great humor.
So you get the depth of the situation…
James was my scuba instructor, he’s this middle aged British man that takes full advantage of an inappropriate joke whenever he can. His hasty humor made the course much more enjoyable as I often laughed, but mostly watched the others in my course struggle to react to his banter haha — that was the real fun for me. As I mentioned before, these dive shops are filled with those hot, rugged looking young guys with weird tattoos and dirty hair. Most girls would love to spend a week learning how to scuba dive with those guys but I was literally the exact opposite. If I was about to go 18 meters deep into the ocean, I wanted somebody to focus on me in ways other than taking the term wetsuit to a whole new meaning.
Shout out to my man, James
During the course you have to practice filling up your mask and taking it off numerous times. It is totally for good reason but I have no shame in saying I absolutely hated it. Your eyes are your safety when you’re underwater, take those away and all other functions suffer greatly. “I have to put my mask back on under water with my hands? Where are my hands? I can’t see? Do I suddenly have feet for hands because I can’t do shit without my eyes? Oh and breathing? Do I do that at the same time?” sums up many of thoughts I had during this part of the course. Thankfully, my instructor could see the stress in my face anytime we did any skill with our masks and I knew he wasn’t going to let me freak out and have a meltdown underwater, so, I did it every time and never doubted my safety. Even with extremely low self-efficacy, I knew James wasn’t going to let me dissolve into the abyss. I’d like to send a big tank-you to James for such a fin-tastic experience!
It’s a different planet
Being 18 meters under water is weird. That in itself is foreign to the human species, but what’s even weirder is how much I loved it. People often fear what they don’t know, the physical and mental pressure that come with scuba diving scares a lot of people off and as much as I understand it, I don’t. To be able to dive into another planet where things float weightlessly around you, creatures are in shapes and colors you have never seen before, and your mind can be completely relieved of anything outside of the water is pure magic. I see why people get completely wrapped up in diving, its the dream to live on an island and spend your days diving into the ocean with no phone, no talking, just total solace. If you ever have the chance, give it a go.. there’s worse things to get peer pressured into.
meraki mik 