Scuba Trip

The Lagoon

I’m over a week behind on this thing…oops.

Last Monday we went on our dive trip. You book ahead for one dive and then you can buy additional dives once you’re on the boat. Katy, Jamie, Matt and I were all in a group with one instructor. They went over everything we needed to know down there and it was all simple enough. They showed us the underwater hand signals for “ok” and “problem” and go this way or that way. The only hand signal I ended up using in the short time I was down there was “problem.” There’s a bar a couple meters under the water that you hold onto as a group to practice some of the skills before you go all the way down and when we were doing that, I couldn’t catch my breath at all. The instructor kept signaling for me to take slow, deep breaths but I never felt like I was getting enough air. Problem. He went up to the surface with me and told me to try this or that to make it better. I went under and grabbed the bar again. Panic attack…problem. After that I decided I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to have some sort of weird hyperventilating episode when I was really deep and then not be able to make it to the surface. Getting eaten by a shark is at least a cool underwater death…drowning even though you have a tank full of air strapped to your back is not.

So I snorkeled the rest of the day, which was actually really good. The reef is so close to the surface that you really don’t even need to dive…or at least that’s what I tell myself. The reef is SO big. But I guess that’s why they added the word “great” in front of the barrier reef part. There was so much to look at and so many different fish that I’d never seen before. Everyone else I was with loved diving, of course, and went for a second dive in the afternoon. So I snorkeled some more by myself and got a chance to use my waterproof video camera. There were some really huge schools of fish that swam by me which was really cool. I didn’t see any sharks, unfortunately.

I haven’t completely given up on diving. I’m going to try it again when Jess is here in July and we go to the Whitsundays. Until then, I will be taking long, deep breaths in and out of my mouth.