Each New Day

We finished up our classroom portion of our scuba diving class last night. The kids both passed with 78% and my husband and I both passed with 88%. Whew! Now all we have left is our open water diving skills, which we will do this weekend.  Hopefully we can pass the skills that we already learned in the pool!

We all passed our pool skills in our scuba diving class last week. I was very nervous, but wanted to give it another go. The skills that we must pass are all very scary to think about, but are vital to survival if we are going to pursue this hobby (which I am still not convinced that we should!)

My daughter was my partner and she is the one who gave me the courage to go through with it. She had been encouraging me all day before class. And in class, she did all the skills before me. So watching her stay so calm and go through each skill with such ease made me HAVE to do the same! She is really awesome and loves the class so far.

My husband was able to go to the lake on Saturday and he passed his test in the lake. My kids and I will go out this weekend for our lake test. Hopefully I will be able to stay as calm as my daughter!

Tonight was our first night in the pool at our scuba diving class. We got to the indoor pool ready to take our swim test. We thought we had to swim six laps, it was only four, which was good news! The water was COLD, but we got our laps done (fairly) quickly and moved on to the tread test. We had to tread water for ten minutes. That was a little intimidating sounding, but it went by quickly. An instructor came in with us and kept time and we all chatted, so it did not seem so bad. Then it was time to get gear, suit up and get in the water.

After much waiting around, we finally got our stuff together and ready to proceed. The instructor told us to open our air and push the purge button on the breathing regulator. Mine went kind of nuts, since it was a different one for deeper dives. I kind of lost composure then. It really scared me. But we continued and I got in the pool with everyone else. It is really hard to make myself breath deep and slow, but “regular” at the same time. I had a hard time with the concept and in the end ended up losing composure again. By that time, the instructor said I was hyperventilating and was too cold and needed to get out and get into a hot shower.

The shower felt good, but I felt bad. I hated letting my husband down (he says I didn’t) and of course the kids too. Who by the way did AWESOME! I hope that next week will go better. Especially since the kids did so well and liked it so much, we are looking forward to some family dives over the next few years.

I am still not really sure what caused my loss of composure (twice!) nor how to prevent it next week. Especially considering the fact that I had already passed the basic class last summer and did a forty foot dive in the ocean!!

Last summer, my husband took me on a cruise for out twentieth wedding anniversary. We had a wonderful time. One of the coolest things we did was take a introduction to scuba diving course in Roatan, Honduras. He really fell in love with it and has been talking about getting us certified to dive.

Last night we attended our first session of scuba training. The certification will be good for life (though for my daughter she will have to renew) and the teacher is really trying to keep the costs down as much as possible. We think this will become an awesome way for our family to vacation together. Thursday we take our swimming test…then we will really begin!