Finding (or at least looking at) Nemo

[By Kai]

Modern technology these days. A hundred years ago horse drawn carts were the standard form of transportation: now, with the help of a little technology, we can quite easily breathe underwater. Recreationally. Seriously, though. Breathing underwater. It’s really an extremely strange experience. The first breath is terrifying; the unreasonable side of your brain is screaming at you not to breathe in, that you can’t breathe underwater and will get a lungful of water.  Once you do get underwater, however, it’s amazing. The fish, swimming all around you. You’re floating, easily, and you can propel yourself any direction you want. It’s like flying.

By now you’ve probably figured out that we went scuba diving. Well, congratulations, you’ve just won a prize, because yes, yes we did. Golden Buddha Resort, (remember that place?) had a small dive shop a five minute walk from our room, which served as our base of operations. The course was set up strangely, in an unfitting college course style. (It actually counts as college credit.) Every day, we would first read a chapter of our textbooks on diving, complete with tests and pictures. (Oh, and constant reminders about how our scuba suit can look "stylish". Guess some company funds PADI.) We then went to the dive shop for another test, and a check of the tests we had done at home. When the testing was finally over, we were briefed by our instructor, a Frenchman named Gregoire, who, being French, pronounced H’s where there shouldn’t be H’s, and took out the H’s when there should have been some. This got very confusing, as the most common word in scuba diving is probably “air”. We now all had “hair” in our lungs. 

After a few minutes of frantically trying to breathe past the hair in our lungs (I kid, I kid), we finally began to get our scuba stuff on. This consists of a mask, goggles, fins, an inflatable thing that lets you rise and sink underwater, and… the tank. My nemesis. Our tanks were big, They were heavy. They were unfortunately very necessary due to them carrying all of our air. To add to this, their attachment was not meant for land, and was very uncomfortable. The real problem, though, was that the water was a good 5 minute walk from the place where we suited up. I cursed the tank every step of the way. I did eventually get in the water, though, and then I became weightless.

Doing the swim test portion of the PADI course - 300 meters

Underwater, we did a variety of different exercises, from neutralizing our buoyancy to having our air turned off and being forced to rely on a partner’s alternate air source. The hardest one, though, was taking off and putting back on our mask, underwater. It doesn’t sound difficult at all, but taking off your mask causes your nose to be exposed, and breathing through your mouth only with water tickling the bottom of your nose is a strangely difficult and very panic-inducing thing. Then there was the challenge of putting the mask back on. I put it on, easily enough, but it was unfortunately filled with water. When underwater, you clear your mask by looking up and blowing through your nose, so I proceeded to do exactly that. However, I had air, I mean…hair… not really air… actually hair this time… trapped in my mask, letting all of the water back in every time I cleared it.  And we didn’t only have to do this exercise once. Oh no. No, we did it practically every single class. Naturally.

After I (mostly) got used to it, though, we got to do the thing we’d been waiting for: a trip to the reefs. We got on a fairly nice speedboat and began a 2 hour trip to the Surin Islands, one of the top dive sites anywhere in the world. To exit the water, we had to do a special maneuver where we sat on the edge of the boat and rolled over backwards into the water. It’s scary at first, but once you get used to it it’s no problem. We proceeded to dive, dropping down immediately and swimming around the bottom. There were fish. Everywhere. Thousands of fish, swimming all around us. Schools of fish, swimming in perfect synchronization. Big fish. Little fish. Striped fish. Rainbow fish. Have I mentioned that there were fish? Seriously, though, there were an amazing number of fish. We saw a thin meter-long fish that looked like a big tube. We saw a shiny fish with every color of the rainbow on its scales. We saw clownfish (funny, everyone here calls them “Nemo-fish”) darting in and out of their sea anemone. We saw a beautiful school of green and blue fish. We saw a spotted eel in the cracks of a rock. We saw huge clams as big as a small dog. We saw a huge…mega-school of fish that covered an entire mini-reef. We saw everything imaginable.

On the second dive, we moved to a slightly different area. This one had less fish, it seemed, but that could have been because we broke a crucial (at least according to the textbook) law of scuba diving. We started the dive (dun dun) with the current. (dramatic sound) The problem is that you start the dive swimming along the current, so when you come back, you’re swimming against it. You want it to be the other way around, so if you get tired at some point the current will carry you to the boat, not away from it. Unfortunately, we weren’t doing that, so we had to swim against the current going back. The current was pushing us almost as fast as we could swim, and it was a struggle to even stay in the same place. Dad and Gregoire got far ahead of Mom and me, to the point where the lowish visibility made them almost disappear from view. If we had just been aboveground, we could have just shouted for them to slow down, but it’s hard to yell legibly underwater, especially with a regulator (the thing that gives you air) in your mouth. Eventually, we caught back up with each other, signaled the boat, and got picked up.

So yeah, we’re all certified PADI Open Water Divers now. That means we can dive to up to 18 meters (that’s about 60 feet) underwater without an instructor. We get a little card and everything. 

May you never have hair in your lungs!