Learning to fly underwater
Trip Start
Sep 17, 2007
1
15
273
Trip End
Oct 08, 2008
Where I stayed
Utila, Honduras
Saturday, October 6, 2007
Travelling with a guidebook, especially in a place as relatively untouristed as Central America, puts you in a sort of time warp. The most recent guidebook we could find was from 2004. In 2004, Utila was the cheapest place on the planet to dive. In 2007, things had changed a little bit. It started at La Ceiba, where we needed to get a taxi to the docks. The driver wouldn't go lower than four times the price listed in the guidebook. The actual ferry ticket to the islands had doubled in price. Maybe Utila was still cheap, but getting there wasn't.
Arriving at the docks was an interesting experience. We were still in low season, which meant that everyone was waiting for our personal business. We couldn't leave the docks without facing the wall of dive shop cronies. But it wasn't the hard, persistent sell of the taxi guys we were dreading. It was the European version. Everyone had useful fliers and conversed in rational, agreeable tones. They explained earnestly why their shop was the best on the island. It was kind of funny actually. We listened patiently and then escaped off the dock into the main street. We decided not to make any decisions tonight just as we were approached by Alfredo, a crazy guy who was born and raised on the island. He talked us into staying at his hotel and promised not to talk anymore about diving. For now. He scooted along on his scooter as he gave us a impromptu tour of the island.
After staying in a decent room for the night, we spent the next morning visiting almost every dive shop on the island (there are 11 of them). The various sales pitches were very entertaining. In case you end up going there, let me give you a quick summary...
It turns out that prices have gone up slightly. To get certified on Utila it is now around $250 for a 3-4 day course, up from $180 a few years ago. Fun dives, individual dives, have almost doubled from about $25 to $50 per dive. It's still cheap, just not the cheapest. And since we were in low season, we got 4 nights of accommodation and 2 fun dives free after the course as well. Gunter's dive shop had a nice dock but it was expensive. Deep Blue Divers is the quiet and strictly not-a-party-type dive shop. They stick up their noses at the drink and dive places. Captain Morgan's has a dive shop and hotel on one of the smaller islands near Utila. It looks really nice but we didn't want to be stranded. Cross Creek Divers looked like the nicest dive shop on the island. They had really nice equipment, a cool hotel, even a restaurant, TV, and Internet. Alton's had a great dock and bar. Utila Dive Center is the most well known and they have three fancy boats. They're also the most expensive. After learning a lot about scuba stores and what to look for, we ended up going with Underwater Vision, the very place we had stayed on the first night. We chose this place because the price was a little better than at other places, he offered to take pictures of us diving, and Erin really liked Eric, our Canadian dive instructor. He even spent a lot of time showing us pictures he had taken of various underwater creatures.
And so we embarked on 4 days of intensive instruction to learn how to scuba dive.
PADI is the organization that certifies new divers and allows them to dive around the world. There are several courses, but the first one is the Open Water course, which allows you to dive to a depth of 18 meters. Advanced Open Water takes you down to 30 meters, and then there are various specialty courses for things like wreck diving (looks cool), night diving, underwater photo, etc.
The first thing you have to do in these courses is watch a bunch of videos as you go through four chapters in the Open Water book. This teaches you about your equipment, the differences between being in air and being underwater, and tons and tons of safety procedures.
Scuba gear consists of the following components: A BCD (buoyancy control device) which is basically a jacket that can be filled with air; a weight belt, which balances with the BCD to help you sink or float; a scuba tank, which supplies air to your primary and backup regulators for breathing, a pressure gauge, and an inflater for the BCD. Flippers, a mask, and a snorkel as well of course. You have to become familiar with all of these things above and below water.
The goal of scuba is to make yourself neutrally buoyant, meaning you are suspended and weightless in water and can go in any direction easily. This is harder than it sounds, and most of the time you are either sinking and inflating your jacket trying to rise or rising and trying to deflate your jacket to go down. It must be funny to just watch a new group of divers flailing around as they try to stabilize.
Depth does funny things to a person. Herein lies the danger in scuba diving. You cannot freak out and lose control of yourself. Your first instinct when something happens underwater is to get to the surface. And that's the worst thing you can do. Its all about the nitrogen and pressure. Erin really loves all the physics.
Every 10 meters you go down underwater is an additional atmosphere of pressure on your body and the gas you breathe. This pressure squashes gas into a smaller space. Therefore, at ten meters, you only have half the volume of air you started with at twice the density. This means that the air in your tank doesn't last nearly as long when you go deeper, and the air you breath as you go deeper is at higher pressure, meaning you take in more molecules with each breath.
Breathing high pressure oxygen doesn't become a problem until very deep, but the extra nitrogen being absorbed by your body causes two big problems. The first is called nitrogen narcosis, which occurs when the nitrogen becomes concentrated enough to become intoxicating. That's right...it makes you drunk underwater. This causes people to do stupid things, like try to offer fish their air. The good thing about nitrogen narcosis is it will stop immediately with no after effects once you ascend. Some people even like it.
The more dangerous nitrogen problem is decompression sickness. This is caused by ascending rapidly and causing the nitrogen to form bubbles in your tissue as it dissolves out. Decompression sickness can really do bad things to you, so you want to dive only to certain depths for certain times, and always ascend slowly when you are coming to the surface. Another problem with ascending rapidly is that air will expand as you ascend. So if you hold your breath while you go up the air inside you lungs will get bigger than your lungs can handle. The golden rule in scuba diving is to never hold your breath. A very complicated looking dive table is used to determine how long you can dive and to what depths, and how long to wait in between dives.
Now that you have all that background, the course consists of around 2 confined water dives (like in a pool or in our case shallow water) and 4 open water dives. There were two other students in our class, the instructor Eric, and a dive master to watch over each buddy pair. These poor ladies had the fun job of holding us steady while we performed exercises underwater and of pulling us out of trouble. Most of the dives involved us watching Eric do things and then copying. Generally this involved taking various pieces of equipment off and putting them back on underwater. We had to be prepared for all situations, like if our regulator got knocked out of our mouths. You have to breath out continuously (never hold your breath), recover the mouth piece, and then clear the water before breathing in. Clearing your mask underwater involves blowing hard out your nose while pressing your mask at the top. The worst is actually taking off your mask underwater, because you have to be careful not to breathe in through your nose. At one point Eric turned of our air so we would know what its like to run out. Drawing air becomes harder and harder until you hit a wall and can't get any more. When we are low we can signal our buddy and use their alternate air source as we ascend.
Since we can't talk underwater, there is a set of hand signals used to communicate. They are fairly self-explanatory, except for the couple that mean something else to you. Thumbs up isn't good, it means do you want to go up. And waving to someone while floating on the surface will make them come rescue you. Have to be careful sometimes. The hard-core divers have a more dirty set of signals of course. Also signals for various creatures underwater. Some are similar, like the shark (fin over the head) and tiny squirrel fish (mohawk). So a conversation can go like this:
Diver 1: *Squirrel fish*
Diver 2: *Shark!* *Danger?*
Diver 1: *No stupid, just a little fish*
Things can get a little confusing when you talk with your hands. Eric mentioned that usually a danger signal, like for a shark, can turn into a *lets go follow the shark and watch it* signal.
Anyways, the first dive was on our knees with the water just over our heads. Then a little deeper. Then 12 meters. And finally 18 meters. When we were at shallow depths, we found everything fairly enjoyable. The first time we went on an actual dive, however, Erin came up and said she would be happy if we never went diving again. Going down is hard on the ears - you need to equalize by holding your nose and blowing every meter or so. It's hard to get used to at first. We had a really tough time with our buoyancy, especially since we weren't yet properly weighted. We held hands and every time I looked over Erin would alternate between being above me and below me. Our divemaster held on to our tanks and kept yanking on them to try to get us to fix things. She was an angry underwater signaler. It wasn't our fault when the instructor and the other two in front of us went in different directions. Or we kept running into the group in front of us. I think we were fairly certain of the fact that if she tugged on our tank one more time we would have tugged out her regulator. I didn't see many fish on that first dive. After the second dive (the third of the day) I was tired and dispirited. "Ï hate diving," said Erin over dinner.
Of course, things were much better the next day. We had much better control underwater, and Tanya didn't hold onto our tanks so we had more freedom to figure out how to move on our own. We passed giant barrel sponges, giant angelfish, and pretty schools of blue tangs. We had finally learned how to fly. "I love diving," said Erin.
Our first dive that day was to a sailboat wreck. The owner had left in on the island for two years and when he returned it was completely stripped. He was so angry he brought it out here and sunk it. It was really cool to float above that wreck. I'm looking forward to going wreck diving in the future. We also passed a barbecue that had fallen from a boat along with a bunch of beers (no longer present).
We had done buoyancy control exercises such as the fin pivot before. Once you achieve neutral buoyancy, if you breath in you'll rise, and if you exhale you'll sink. So you can bob up and down in the water. On the last dive we practiced the hover, where you try to hold yourself floating in the water (see our pictures). Then he had us all take off our flippers and moonwalk over to a sand patch. Here we did flips in slow motion, the matrix kick, running in horizontal circles. It was pretty fun. We had completed our certification dives. We later took the final exam, fifty multiple choice questions. He would buy anyone an ice cream that got them all. I missed one. He made fun of me.
We are now certified Open Water Divers, and proud of it. Thinking about going for Advanced Open Water when we are in Thailand or Egypt.
I wouldn't say scuba diving is easy. But it's fun and a challenge. And once you get through all the safety procedures the dives seem almost easy in comparison. We took our fun dives the day after the course and had a great time looking around and trying not to look too inexperienced. But by this time everything was second nature. I'm glad we weren't diving anymore because the flippers didn't really fit and I have several bleeding sores on my toes as well as severe armpit chafing from the wetsuit. But I'm looking forward to diving again.
Travis
Comments
Scuba duba!
Good detail Erin and Travis, and a journal record for your entry effort. Reading 'The World Without Us' (Weiseman begins with the Zapara of Ecuador. We're enjoying the tour; rainy and fall well underway up here. L, Dad