Dive Experience

My heart is pounding, I see my fins through the mask, they look blurry. I put my regulator in the mouth, and breathe. As I get closer to the edge of the boat, my heart is pounding so hard that I feel its going to burst any moment. I breathe shallower and faster. All the noise on the boat, including instructions from Dive Master, start to fade away. All I can hear is my heart beat. I take a giant stride and bllllllluuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrpppppppppppppppppppppp ( I couldn't believe that I actually jumped in ocean).

For a fraction of second, there is pin drop silence and I just see the bubbles and wonder if i am ever going to surface. Good Lord, I do. "Are you OK?" the first thing I hear after I surface, I signal with my hand take the regulator out of my mouth, relax and laugh in jubilation. The first step is done.

After a series of instructions, we all decide to go down. I put my regulator back in the mouth, and take the air out of BCD. I start to sink, the only time I have been happy about sinking. As we go down my ear starts to hurt, this is very typical and is called a squeeze in SCUBA jargon. So I "equalize" and my ears are okay. I look up and the sight of bubbles reaching the ocean surface just made me smile. We go about 15 feet and reach at a point where there is lot of kelp. If you were ever left agape by a picture , where the sun rays are piercing a bunch of thick trees, just use some of your imagination, fill that picture with blue water, add a couple of orange fishes ( Garibaldi ) around those trees and imagine you are watching this picture floating in air. Thats what I got to see. Underwater, the bulky costume, the heavy weights, your air tank, all these don't bother you. You are like an astronaut, without gravity, literally.

We do some hand signals with buddies and instructor to let everyone know, that everybody is fine. And start to swim our way, we see a lot of blacksmiths, bat-rays, lot of snails. I even saw a crab skeleton. After a few minutes, the fishes feel that you are part of system, so they don't try to run away from you ( as long as you don't disturb them). So now, you have fishes swimming with you, wondering what sort of creature you are.

This kind of repeated in the next dive as well. On the third dive, I thought its getting little boring. So the moment arrives, the most beautiful thing I ever saw till date. The salp, I didn't have a camera under water (bummer huh), but the picture is a representation of what i saw, only that the formation was like leaves on a tree branch. I just kept staring at it, for minutes.