SCUBA

As I mentioned before, I signed up for the SCUBA course here at UKZN. For the past two weeks I have been taking part in the course and this weekend I will be travelling to Sodwana Bay, one of the top ten dive spots in the world, to do my five qualifying dives.
Getting it all done has been pretty intense for the past two weeks and taken up the greater part of my brain power and time. The group is usually capped at 18 but somehow this time around it got as big as 24 or so, so there are a lot of us to organize and teach at once. We had lectures on Tuesday and Thursday nights, and then last Saturday and Sunday we had two full days of pool training and lectures. They started at 8:30 or 9 and went until 4. This was truly exhausting. To add to that, I got the chance to go out on a boat off Durban on Saturday morning before class, ie 5:30 am. Caroline and Andrew, two of the people who are super involved in the underwater club/pretty much run it (they are the chairman and secretary and are probably somewhere in their 30’s) took 6 of us to look for dolphins. It ended up being rainy the whole time and we didn’t spot anything but little fish, but the waves were really big because of a surge from Capetown and I rode in the front of the boat. It was sooo fun to go over the waves and we had a great time all together.
Pool training started with a swim test that was more intensive that I had expected. We had to swim across the 25 meter pool underwater in one breath and this took me multiple tries to complete. In fact, I didn’t get it until Sunday morning when I went early to try again by myself (pretty embarrassing but when I got it I popped up out of the water, took a big breath and fist-pumped with joy). We then had to tread for 10 minutes straight. I made it through that and then we learned all kinds of other things in the water, including how to take your regulator (the thing you breath through) out underwater and find it and put it back in, and to take your mask all the way off underwater and put it back on. Then we did both at the same time. I got these on the first tries but it was challenging. You have to fight the feeling that you should be panicking and coming to the surface.
That night I went to a nice Thai restaurant with three friends to relax and have a nice meal. The restaurant was on Florida Road, a swanky place with lots of restaurants and clubs. Apparently it’s the place to “see and be seen” in Durban (say the guide books). The food was great but I’d need a second look at the rest of the street to be convinced.
The second day we were more accustomed to our gear and I had more fun in the pool. We learned other things and then played some games at the end which were really fun. We played broken telephone, where you try to communicate the message with only hand signals. This was pretty hilariously impossible. The last game was dubbed “the war game” and consisted of all the students swimming around in the deep end and the instructors “attacking” us. They could take off our masks, take our regulators out, steal our fins, inflate our BCs (like a flotation vest), undo our weight belts, unbuckle our cylinders and even turn off our air! The goal was to recover from these incidences, like get your mask back on, etc. or come up to the surface if you couldn’t. The last person at the bottoms won. Luckily none of the really bad ones happened to me. I just got my fin stolen a few times and my regulator removed a few times. However when one instructor undid my weight belt he broke the buckle off so I couldn’t get it back on. I had it in one hand and then got a flipper stolen. I couldn’t get both back on and then my mask started to fill with water, so I surfaced, about in the middle of the pack. Some people stayed down impressively long!
I had my written scuba test last night and I passed with a 94%. Then we packed up our gear. I finally got my medical clearance form signed (it’s a huge problem when your school clinic doesn’t have their doctor anymore and gives you the run around) which was a huge area of stress. I am leaving tonight and will be there until Sunday evening. It’s going to be hectic but very exciting. I do three dives on Sat and two on Sunday. I’m on the smaller boat which I think will be nice. I got an underwater disposable camera so I should be able to take some pictures. I’m sharing a tent with some girls, two of which I just met in the course and are really nice. The other is my dive partner, Sarah, who is from France. I’m excited and will certainly write another really long blog post about it later. This week I also had my first Zulu test which I think went well. It was a lot like the practice tests they gave us. I also started planning my Easter break trip with some friends. We are trying to go to Mozambique and Swaziland! We have a lot of planning to do but it should be great.