I saw a seahorse in the sea

Today being Saturday, it meant i was about to take my first ocean plunge. I arrived at the shop at 9am and began to collect my gear and 2 tanks of air. Our instructors talked in a foreign language about southerlies, swells, visibility and names of places i had never heard. however, after a bit they decided and off we went.

Turns out we ended up going to Whitireai bay, which Blaise is familiar with because he has kite surfed there. we arrived, geared up totally (this means 14mm of wetsuit), cross-checked, were briefed on the skills we would practice and then waded into the water to be weighted.

...heavily weighted...i ended up with 6 big weights pulling in at about 14 kilos (about 30 pounds). we had to take off our weight belt on the surface and then put it back on. its a relatively simple procedure, grasp the free end in your right hand, bring it right to your hip, lie on your back and "turn away from the nasty weight belt". do it fast btw because thats a lot of weight on an arm and you drop it....well you don't want to do that to the instructor who is marking you. by doing this manuver you rotate it onto your back and then you can float face down (with your respirator in), all the weight safely on your back and re-clip the belt.

did i mention that 30 pounds? in the waves which are moving around you and in full gear which makes it really quite frustrating to get it back between your wetsuit and buoyancy vest. as i struggled away trying to get it on (and not drop it!) a strong wave hit my foot and i guess i hadn't tightened the flipper enough because it pushed around off my foot and became a charming anklet bracelet. Now i was really struggling i was being spun in circles cause the one flipper was getting pushed around like a rudder. i couldn't get upright for fear of dropping the belt. all i could do was breathe through the respirator and keep working on the belt. i knew the instructors wouldn't let me float away. i was breathing hard, swearing through the respirator. my instructor said i was very 'creative' in my wording, he could hear me underwater as he swam up to me through the water. he grabbed my back leg and was holding me still and getting my flipper back on and i kept fighting the damn weight. 30 pounds is hard to lift when you can't rotate your arms fully backwards and can't move in any real direction. i eventually got the d*mn thing clipped and tight enough not to slip off. i used a pile of air though in my struggles, the tank started at 210 psi, and dropped to 160 psi in that 5 minutes; i ended with my tank at 70 psi. as a comparison my 2nd dive later that day i started at 200 psi and ended at 130. you can see by the numbers i was really sucking the air desperately that first dive.

ok that was the bad but it wasn't really bad. onto the fun stuff ^^bb

getting down still seemed slow but i was definitely going down. so much weight that i had to inflate my buoyancy vest so that i could get off the bottom and actually swim. the visibility was horrible, less than 0.5m; on the plus side the instructors pointed out that we essentially got the worst visibility we could have ever gotten so it could only get better. we lost my dive buddy at one point so we even got a chance to practice lost buddy procedures (we popped out at the surface about the same time, he was fine). we went down essentially touching the next go and the instructor had us all connected when we swam.

compass work: i rock! seriously. i had a busted compass on my guages (i get a new one for tomorrow) but i was still able to follow it and arise less than a meter from the dive flag. the 2nd instructor gave me his arm compass and sent us off on a mission. pick a direction, swim that way without looking across the water surface, use only your compass, swim about 20 kicks, do a 180 and get back to the flag. i surfaced about 50 cm from it. my dive buddy was meters away and the other 2 didn't do much better, one girl was swimming in circles (quite literally). why did i do so good? i'm the slowest swimmer by far of our group, i have the worst buoyancy control of the 4 of us but because i'm a slow swimmer anyway i just kept kicking at my speed and reading the compass. turns out i got it right because by going slow it adjusts (and you too) more accurately and you stay on course. HUZZAH!!! Instructor Roy was actually extremely vocal in his praise for my compass skills, i felt so awesome.

the swells above us were getting worse and rather than trying to swim across the rough surface Graham said we would just swim in along the bottom of the ocean. so linking it up so we didn't lose anyone we headed in. i was between the 2 big guys so it wasn't hard work (remember i'm the slow one, i was literally being pulled along), so i got to enjoy looking around as best i could and i saw a wandering anemone. looked like a big soft tubular plant with white hairy looking feathers on its head. "cool" i thought as it moved back and forth with the waves. then i felt a squeeze on my hand, i stopped and there was Instructor Graham with his hands in front of him. It took me a sec to see what was the hold up, in front of him was this beautiful tiny little seahorse. it couldn't have been bigger than my whole hand and it floated amongst us 5 divers, Graham gently moved it towards my mask when it started to float away. I was so calm for a moment, it seemed like a perfect moment. We let it float away and continued into shore.

my first 2 ocean dives. better each time and that second time i saw "FISHIES".
i like this scuba thing.