PADI Advanced Open Water

This past Friday and Saturday, John, Chuck, Eric, and I got our PADI advanced open water cert! It was a long weekend of diving, but a lot of fun. To get the certification, you have to make 5 specialty dives: two required, and three that you choose. Our 5 dives were navigation, search and recovery, night, deep, and wreck. We did the first three on Friday and the last two on Saturday. One dive is tiring...5 is exhausting!

I originally though the navigation dive was going to be very boring, but it would up being pretty interesting. To make it though, you have to rely on your buddy a lot, as one person reads the compass and the other counts kicks to try to gauge how far you've traveled. Towards the end, Eric and I thought we were way off course, but wound up being right on. The search and recovery dive was also pretty interesting. We learned how to find stuff underwater, tie knots underwater, and hoist things to the surface using lift bags. The night dive was probably the best of the 5. I was a little hesitant since eels come out at night and I am not friends with eels. However, it wound up being pretty amazing. It's a very neat feeling being down there in the pitch dark, just following the light from everyone's flashlights. At one point, we turned our lights off for about 5 minutes and sat there. Once your eyes adjust, you notice all of the photoluminescent stuff under the ocean, which is pretty much everything! When you touched the sand, it looked like sparks were shooting out of your fingers.

Saturday was deep and wreck, although both wound up being wreck dives. The deep dive was a 250' wreck which sat in about 110' of water. We did math problems at the surface and underwater, to see if Nitrogen affected our ability to think straight. I wound up doing better at 110', which either speaks highly of my ability to do math underwater or poorly of my ability to do math on the surface! The second wreck, at a more reasonable depth of 40-60' was The Gregory, which was a site I'd been to before. However, we spent more time exploring the reef than I had before and it was also a very good dive.

We completed all the diving at Dive Octopus, which is now under new ownership. The new owners, Chris and Sally, are a ton of fun to dive with. They've also changed their prices for us and give us very good dive rates (the best on the island). They're the third dive shop I've gone diving with, and easily the best.

Who said med school was all studying?