It's official, Dax and Liz are now open water scuba certified, with 4 dives under their belts. Woo hoo! And we have the cards to prove it.
This has been a challenging last three days. I last wrote about getting sea sickness and still not having fully recovered the next day. Thankfully I was all better by Wednesday, when we did our first dives. We started off in shallow water just off the beach of the Scuba Junction office. Then we got on a boat (sea sickness pills ingested) and went out to a spot about 3 meters deep. Both of these shallow dives were meant to help us learn skills like inflating and deflating our buoyancy compensators (BC for short), removing and retrieving our mouth pieces (called second-stage regulators), and clearing our goggles once they'd filled up with water. Another skill that was a bit tricky for me to learn was how to equalize my sinus pressure as I descend to deeper waters. I sorta got the hang of it by swallowing and bending my neck back and forth, but my ears still feel funny and they haven't properly popped yet now that I'm back on dry land. It's cool though, it just takes practice.
The visibility wasn't great but we did see a bunch of neat coral and colorful fish. We saw trigger fish, file fish, sea cucumbers, cardinal fish, damsel fish, brain coral, and tons of other stuff that's too numerous to mention here. By the time we did our fourth dive, I was a lot better at checking out the scenery as opposed to just keeping an eye on my instructor's fins so I wouldn't get lost.
Dax is just thrilled to finally have an open water certification. Elias has been diving for a while now and has some advanced certifications, so it will be fun to go out diving with him once we reach Koh Lanta, an island south west of here on the Andaman Sea. We leave for Ao Nang this morning so I'm going to stop writing and finish packing!
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