Scuba Diving

Lee has wanted be to get SCUBA certified for the longest time.... yes, THE LONGEST TIME. He started trying to convince me after Ally was born. Unfortunately, getting certified is both costly and time consuming. At that particular time I was just a wee bit distracted by having two babies in 17 months, and spending the better part of 3 years either being pregnant or breastfeeding, neither of which are terribly conducive to learning how to dive.

Finally, after 9 years, I have both the means AND the time - amazing how it only took 9 years to get both to occur simultaneously. Lee bought me lessons for my 34th birthday present. It took two days in the classroom/swimming pool and 2 days (4 dives total) in Thailand to get PADI certified, but, I DID IT! Yeah! Poor Lee... he watched my brother get certified, we watched my sister get certified, he took a dive trip with both my brother and father, all not so patiently waiting for his wife to get it done. (I know, I am just a tiny bit sarcastic today... I think it has something to do with the crappy weather outside.) Anywho, in spite of my somewhat sarcastic undertone, I was really happy and excited to get certified. My classroom instructor was an English guy, nice enough but dumb enough to try and argue gun control with me and incredibly stupid enough to insult Americans while sitting in a one on one lesson with me in the classroom.... not my idea of a good teacher. Regardless, I learned the skills, took the tests and enjoyed my dives so much more than my classroom time.

My first two dives were beach dives. My instructor and I took a tuk tuk to the beach, geared up and walked into our dive site. It was a really nice reef and even though it was so close to a public beach, it seemed well kept and surprisingly was unpopulated with divers. It was a little scary at first. I am a natural swimmer and swim twice a week, winter, summer, and fall, so that wasn't the scary part. Breathing underwater was really a lot easier to adjust to that I thought it would be. The scary part was learning to maintain buoyancy.... learning how to float at the right depth without bouncing all over the bottom of the reef. Once I figured that out, it was so much fun! We saw lionfish and so many beautifully colored corals. It was so neat.

Here's an example of a tuk tuk. (This wasn't ours)

The boat dives the next day were even more spectacular. The kids stayed at the resort's kids club while Lee and I took the whole day for our dives. Our dive master was Italian... don't remember his name, but he was a really nice guy. We took another tuk tuk to the pier, where there were literally hundreds of other people waiting to get on busses that would take us down to the end of a really long pier where all our chartered boats were waiting.

Here's a view of the harbor as we were setting out for our dive.

So we took a chartered boat with about 20 people, all going on their own separate dives with their own dive masters. It was interesting because I was worried that with all those people the dive site would be crowded, but it wasn't. We went out about an hour and a half out to dive some reefs off of an island (I don't remember which island it was.) Of course, I got sea sick, I always do! I took some dramamine on the boat, fell asleep in the sun and got a burn before we even got to the dive site.... grhh... 

We really had a great time, despite the early sunburn. The sun is so strong in Thailand. Lee and I both put SPF 30 as we were leaving the pier and I was only sitting in the sun for about 25 minutes, so it didn't even occur to me that I would get burned so quickly. 

So, we really enjoyed the day together. We had a great Thai lunch on the boat, we enjoyed listening to all the languages being spoken - I remember hearing French, Thai, Japanese, Hindi and English. After lunch we had our second dive, which was really the coolest. There was a school of young barracuda that we swam through. It was so neat - a lot like the school of fish on Finding Nemo that made all the shapes for Dory to guess. We swam right through the school. They sort of parted for us and then just filled in right around us as we swam.

It was a wonderful experience, spending the day with Lee and starting a new hobby together. I can't wait to dive again! The only downside to the whole day was that I was so, so tired when we got back after 5 PM that night. I felt like I was on the boat until I fell asleep that night! 

Here we are on our way home from a great day!

This the view of the islands as we headed home.