Sally’s SCUBA experience…

Hi everyone!

So earlier, Mom mentioned about taking scuba. Now, after four days of training, I can proudly say “I am a PADI certified diver”! The first time I breathed underwater was so neat. The thrill of being under the water is cooler than you can imagine! Our training spot wasn’t so great but a way better dive than snorkeling!  We all got used to breathing, equalizing, and all that jazz in the shallows.  Then we moved out further to about 4 meter or 10ish feet and tried everything in deeper water.  Once we knew the basics, we were ready for an open water dive.

We were all excited for our 1st open water dive on Flamingo Reef. We found some awesome fish, eels, crabs, and lots and lots of coral! After about 45 minutes Lucy’s and Fenton’s air was around 70 bars so we headed back up to the surface. We got back into the boat and took all of our gear off, we relaxed at the surface for a little and had juice and popcorn! Then, the engines turned on and we headed over to the underwater sculpture park. Unfortunately, a hurricane had broken some of the statues. Previously, we had checked out the sculpture park with our snorkeling gear—after a big rain which caused murky, bad visibility.  But on this dive, we could see everything! It was really cool! My favorite statue was of a mermaid holding a conch shell up to the surface. Once we saw all the sculptures, we headed back up to the surface.

The next day, we woke up bright and early only to find rain. We still got in our dinghy and headed to ScubaTech. When we got there, the rain calmed down. We loaded up the dive boat with our gear and Joshua joined us a few minutes later. We started heading to a wreck, named the Veronica! We went down to the wreck by pulling ourselves down a line attached to dive boat and the wreck.  From the top, it just looked like a sunken boat and not very interesting.  However, once we got all the way down, it was beautiful and so cool. There were lots of different colored fish. We dove into the wreck and swam through a few doors which was really cool. The one bad thing was fire coral that I accidentally touched. It hurt a lot but it’s better now. The coolest part of the wreck was seeing the old anchor and windlass (a boat part to help pull up the anchor) and all of the fish swimming in and out of the anchor.  Once we surfaced, we stayed on the dive boat for about an hour. We ate buttery popcorn and juice— yum the juice was cold!  After we spent enough time at sea level (so any extra nitrogen got out of our bodies), we headed over to a very pretty reef named Purple Rain! It was gorgeous— the coral was millions of colors and there were lots and lots of fish. I did flips in the water and it was so fun! Unfortunately, my air went down to about 40 bars so we had to go back up. Our last dive was so fun!!  We went back to the dive shop and got PADI certified—woo-hoo!! I can’t wait for our next dive!

Hope you enjoyed my blog,

Sally