Somewhere Beyond the Sea!
Wow! What a day! We got up REALLY early (5:45… What kind of honeymoon is this!? When I can sleep, we have to get up…. When I can’t sleep, we have nothing planned!).
Scuba diving… Yep SCUBA! Even though neither one of us has a scuba certification we got to diving for real. Snorkeling was great yesterday and I still love snorkeling … It is so much easier… Scuba diving was an amazing experience.
We got picked up from our hotel a bit late so we had to hustle when we got to the dive shop (BoPhut Diving School). We got fitted for fins (lime green for me and blue for Brian) and masks. Next they gave us wetsuits (apparel of evil) to try on. The guy wasn’t sure what size to try to stuff me in … And was wasn’t to excited to be stuffed in the damn thing anyway. I ended up with a medium, loose on bottom, tight on top… Not that is really matters once you are wet or sweaty… It is nearly impossible to squeeze into the damn thing and zip it up by yourself. (think of a full body squeezie/slimmer/shaper thing made out of rubber… Then imagine trying to put it on in a boat that is moving and your skin is already wet. So hard! Oh! And the zipper is in the back! What sadist designed this thing!?). Anyway, we collected our stuff and off we went with the rest of the group to the boat.
It was supposed to be about an hour and a half trip, but it was more like two. We’ve had some winds and a bit of rain over night and the waters were still rough. They asked us twice if we ever got sea sick! (Put me in a helicopter and I’ll barf, but I can take the rolling water all day!)
Since the water was rough we ended up going to a different dive site then they normally take groups. Brian and I were the only two diving- babies … Or ‘beginners’ as they more kindly called us… So we got our own diving instructor. Another girl came with our group since this was her last dive for her certification.
Our instructor, Shawn, explained all of our equipment, stuffed us into it and shoved us out of the boat. We swam to the beach where we went over the basics like putting air into our jackets to counter the ten tons of weights he slung around our hips (he said we had more weights than we needed… I sure as hell wasn’t going to float away!) and how to use our regulators and how to flip or fins… Fun stuff.
We did a bit in the shallows, mostly I think to give us a chance to figure out how to breathe and to see if we could follow directions under water. After some simple tasks, (sinking, clearing our masks, finding our regulator if we lost it, laying on our tummies) we were able to dive.
It took me much longer than I ever would have guessed to just figure out how to breathe. Do I normally take really long pauses when I am breathing? Am I breathing too deep? I felt like Darth Vader blowing bubbles! But I finally caught on (at least I didn’t hyperventalate or get too distracted by the bubbles) and off we went.
The fish were amazing! I met a Trigger fish and a Magnificent Slug (what a name, huh?) and um… more anenomies! And this white tube looking thing with little fingers at the end! And yellow and purple feather duster looking guys that would suck back into the coral when we swam over them. No turtles though… And we were in Turtle Bay … Then again, the advanced divers had gone to Shark Bay and I hoped for their sake that the name wasn’t accurate!
We played for an hour and the went back to the boat for lunch. Our instructor told us that normally visibility is something like 12m, bot with the rain we only had 3m. I can only imaging how amazing it must be normally. I was impressed by what we could see. After lunch we took another hour long dive and then we drove the two hours back to Ko Samui.
Brian and I are talking about getting our SCUBA certification. Maybe over the winter after racing season.
By the time we got back to the resort we were so tired that we just crashed. We finally woke up and ordered room service again. From bed (eating fettuicini) I can see to beach and pool. Anatara has torches lit everywhere. It is so beautiful.
