SCUBA Success

I'm officially a certified open water PADI diver. I wanted to get it over with quickly, so I opted for the 1 week course. I watched about 4 hours of DVD's at home & answered some questions from the book before class started. We did Monday & Wednesday night in the classroom, going over the material & taking some quizzes.

Tuesday & Thursday nights we headed to a small dive pool to practice skills like clearing the regulator and properly (safely) ascending & descending. It was all pretty easy and I was much more comfortable at the end of our confined water dives. I still hated clearing my mask though. Finally had some underwater fun with my other camera.

Saturday & Sunday, I drove about an hour and a half outside of Houston to a placed called the Blue Lagoon in Huntsville. It's a rock quarry with 2 separate lakes that have been specifically tricked out for divers with good entrances & sunk boats. We dove over by the little arrow on the left.

There was a whole crew of very serious divers set-up to camp out the night & teach the advanced open water course all afternoon. Having a good instructor that you can trust was really important to making me feel comfortable, safe and calm while underwater.

Although it looks really pretty, the visibility was awful. Another diver had to be within 3 feet for me to identify them, and I couldn't even tell a diver was there beyond about 5 feet. It was also only 24' deep, so all 4 of our dives were pretty shallow.

So.....now what? I think we're going to try to make our anniversary trip in February some place where we can dive. Check out all the direct flights we can take from Houston (love ya Continental!) to tropical places with great diving.

I'm totally loving Yapta (read about it here), as it is tracking flights to Cancun, Cozumel, Belize, Costa Rica & the Grand Caymans. We'll do some more research & watch flight prices. Any suggestions or advice about where to go?

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: My new desk chair arrived 2 weeks early yesterday.