Ooooooo.... Barracuda

I'm very glad that our afternoon dive plan on that first day was for a two-tank dive. If we'd gone back to shore right after my little scare during the turtle dive, I think there's at least a fair chance I might have called it quits and not gone diving again. As it was, we instead headed straight to our next dive site: Barracuda. It was in fact so close to Tortugas that we needed to hang out for a while at the surface before we could head in again. The 20-minute nice, relaxing float on the ocean helped calm me down more.

A current was promised on this dive too, which made me a bit nervous. But this time to help us beat the current a bit, we'd be using the anchor line from our boat to ride down to the ocean floor. This was actually kind of perfect for my state of mind at the time. I wasn't going to have to swim down on my own this time, or worry about the current until we were at the bottom. Just keep going hand over hand:

When we got to the bottom, there was a brief moment of confusion. At the time, I didn't fully understand what was going on, but it turned out that one of our group (my instructor's wife) had started the dive with only a half tank of air. Basically, her extensive diving experience and practically non-existent air usage probably did her a disservice here. Lacking my anxiety over the whole experience, she hadn't checked her pressure five times at the surface like I had, checking it only when we reached the bottom. And since, after the previous Tortugas dive, her tank wasn't nearly empty like... oh.... MINE... the boat team who had helpfully switched out tanks for all the rest of us had probably just glossed over hers. (It didn't seem "empty.")

Needless to say, diving with half a tank really wasn't going to be an issue for her on this dive. She'd just done a deeper, more strenuous dive and used only half her air. Plus, her husband and the dive master both clearly knew what was going on, and so all three could plan accordingly. For me, I simply knew at the time that "something" was "not quite right, but clearly not serious." And oddly, that probably helped settle my still slightly frayed nerves: see, it's not just newbies like me that can have a problem or two.

From there, I went to have my best dive yet. Sadly, my boyfriend's camera ran out of battery power right about the time we reached the bottom, so we don't have many pictures of this one. But we saw plenty of interesting things on the dive. There were several lionfish -- they're pests, but beautiful pests. I spotted a turtle high up on a reef wall before anyone else saw it. Right at the end of the dive, moments after we'd started our ascent, we even spotted a couple of barracuda. (Those I was glad to just see from a distance.)

I still wasn't anything like what I'd call "comfortable" with the scuba experience, but that third dive to end my first day was the first one where I made it from beginning to end without really having any tense moments. We spent the rest of the afternoon and evening lounging around the resort, and I went to bed early and exhausted.