Diving

I love diving.  It is an incredible feeling to be under the water, breathing; and the things you see are absolutely amazing.  I imagine that it's a little like what it would feel like to fly.  You float over the reef looking down, sometimes drifting lower to check something out, sometimes soaring higher above everything.  For the most part it is peaceful and calm but, there are parts of the process that are far from zen-like.

Take the wetsuit for example.  Putting on a wet suit is not fun, especially when you have a little extra girth.  It takes me 20 minutes to get the suit to my waist.  I skinned four of my knuckles and the dive doctor has videotaped the process twice for what I assume is his own amusement, however, should you find it on YouTube, please let me know.

Second is getting in and out of the boat.  Diving here in Tofo is quite interesting.  It is virtually impossible to moor a boat because the sand is deep and continuously shifting, and anything that they try to anchor ends up drifting away.  So, they use a boat with inflated pontoons and a hard plastic bottom and they beach it.  This makes it quite an adventure at the beginning and end of each dive.  To start, the boat is driven to the beach on a trailer and backed into the water as far as it can go.  Then, we all stand at one side of the bow and push it away from the shore.  Quickly we divide so that half of us are on one side, half the other and we push the boat further into the water.  When the boat reaches waist high water, they yell girls in and the women jump into the boat.  The boat is usually up around my shoulders at this point, as I am vertically challenged, and I have to jump really high- definitely not my forte.  What usually happens is that I beach myself about halfway in and someone unceremoniously throws my legs in, rather like tossing a dead seal into the boat.  It's not at all graceful.  During the dive, the process is similar except at the point, there is no bottom to jump off of and I barely make it to the half point.  I am definitely not impressing anyone.  It is my goal to be able to do it effortlessly by the end of the trip.  In the meantime, I get a little help from my friends.

At the end of the trip, we put our feet in foot straps, hold onto ropes that run from the front of the boat to the back and they put the boat full throttle and head for shore.  It's so strange to hear the motors get louder and know that you're heading straight onto shore.  If the boat happens to ride a wave in, the boat gets dumped on the shore with a thud and everyone in it is thrown into the boat with a thud.  Everyone hops out of the boat onto the shore and they pull the boat up a little further with the truck.

In Australia the diving was pretty easy comparatively.  We'd leave from a pier and the back of the boat would have a dive platform- easy in, easy out.  When you got to the dive site there was a mooring line so, you stepped off the boat, found the line and followed it down to the bottom.  Here, you roll backwards off the boat, head straight down and aim for the orange line which is trailing behind the lead diver.  Again, everything is a little bit more difficult here.

However, even with things being more difficult, the whale sharks and manta rays definitely make it all worthwhile and hey, if I can get passed the dead seal stage and can actually get into the boat somewhat gracefully, I will have learnt something new and that's always a good thing.