So it was that on my first morning in Mexico, I was up bright and early, and prepping for my first dive. The dive shop was right there on the beach, just at the edge of our hotel grounds:
There we met Claudio, our dive master for the next three days' worth of excursions. He set about picking out the appropriate equipment for me to borrow while I was there -- wet suit, BCD, regulator, and fins. I'd bought a mask back in the U.S. -- the one piece of scuba equipment I elected to purchase, willing to write off that expense if I hated the whole thing. (My friend the instructor made the instantly compelling point that if there's one thing you want to be absolutely perfect, it's the mask.)
Claudio was a nice guy, and ultimately very patient with me over the course of the next few days. But some of his equipment didn't exactly instill confidence. My regulator had an air pressure gauge, for example, but no depth gauge of any kind -- something my instructor friend said he'd never seen in all his history of diving.
It probably helped me a little bit that I wasn't the only one making extensive use of borrowed equipment. My boyfriend actually has some his own gear... but it's unreachable at the moment, hidden deep in the storage unit where most of his stuff (and a little of mine) waits for us to close on our new house. He was able to dig out his wet suit, and he bought a new mask on which to mount an underwater camera, but his fins couldn't be found. My boyfriend's borrowed gear was only slightly better than mine. His regulator at least had a depth gauge... though the needle inside broke off after day one of diving, rendering it useless.
But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here. It wasn't until after a full day's diving that we all shared in the shock at my lack of readouts. For now, before I'd taken the plunge, I was just figuring I'd leave depth to everyone else, giving me another powerful (though wholly unneeded) incentive to stay with the group.
All geared up, we took the boat out to our first dive site, Jardines. This was a really simple reef location, picked in deference to my lack of experience. It was shallow (no more than 40 feet), virtually without current, and frankly didn't hold much promise of seeing anything cool at this time of year. It was so simple in fact that my brother-in-law elected to sit the dive out. (Not that I'd had any notion of being offended, but he was staying back at the hotel to spend time with my sister and niece, so it's all good.)
So, back flip over the side of the boat, and away we went. I'm watching the dive master sink like a rock to the ocean floor and watching my friends not far behind. My boyfriend is hanging back with me, as a good boyfriend (and dive buddy) should, but I am not getting this at all. Part of this is that I'm underweighted, which we should have checked at the surface, but fortunately my friend swims up and shoves a spare weight he brought into my vest pocket. But I'm still not able to follow them down. I can relax and sink, or I can kick to go forward... and in doing so, I start going up. I can not go forward and down at the same time.
So tip one, to all you people thinking of scuba diving for the first time... and this sadly took me like a minute to figure out (though it felt like three). In scuba training, they tell you a lot about keeping a flat profile, keeping your legs above you as much as possible, and not dragging yourself or your gear on the bottom. They really hit hard that you can damage aquatic life. What they don't really mention is that if your legs are even slightly below you, you will swim up. This is kind of a "duh" thing when you think about it for half a second., but I wasn't thinking about it for even half a second. I was nervous as hell and hardly thinking at all. Certainly I was nowhere near the bottom, so I wasn't thinking at all about dragging on anything. The instant I finally calmed down enough to think about it, I realized "you're not really pointing down, you idiot." A wave of embarrassment passed over me -- but underwater, no one can see you blush -- and then down I went.
The second tip I ultimately learned, I didn't really figure out until near the end of the trip. The one thing that's drilled into you more than anything else in scuba training is "never hold your breath." Ever. Never ever. Seriously. It's like the rules of Fight Club. Don't Hold Your Breath. And Don't Hold Your Breath. Somewhere along the way, this message transformed subtly in my mind to: "never stop breathing." Up here on dry land where all the air is, there's really no distinction between the two. But if you're diving with the mentality "never stop breathing," you're basically never not using your air.
For two-and-a-half days, for every minute of my diving, the instant I'd finish exhaling one breath, I'd start inhaling the next. The instant I finished inhaling that breath, I'd start exhaling it. I'm fairly sure this is not what is meant by "don't hold your breath." And it's a sure-fire way to run out of air much faster than everyone else, as I illustrated on every dive of the trip. It was only very late in the trip that it finally clicked for me that I wasn't quite doing it right... and it was a sort of gradual realization that came from passively noticing the bubbles going up from all my friends' tanks, hearing their breathing patterns on the videos we'd watch later, and not comprehending how my friend's wife could regularly have half a tank left when I was in the red, giving myself unnecessary scares. So diving tip two: "don't hold your breath" doesn't mean "breathe continuously."
I regale you with all these details because otherwise, I really just don't have much to say about my first dive. To help reassure me of my basic skills, my friend had me again do a couple things to remind me that I could -- even out in the ocean. But while that gave me the confidence to keep going, it didn't remotely calm me enough to "enjoy" my first dive in the ocean. I'm pretty sure the point is that you're supposed to watch for interesting aquatic life, but I spent the entire time with my eyes darting between the dive master, my buddy, and my air pressure gauge. I was so preoccupied, I'm not even sure I actually saw any water.
But there is photographic evidence that this all in fact happened:
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