Monday, March 27, 2006
Scuba!
Scuba Diving!
Or more accurately, "scuba sinking" since you don't go down headfirst, you descent slowly and under control so you can equalize your ears on the way down, etc. I won't get technical, at least not this time, but yeah, we were in the pool pretty much all day Saturday and Sunday, practicing all of the unfun, emergency exercises you've got to learn to get certified to go into the actual ocean and have actual fun.
They say that scuba isn't a sport that requires a great deal of strength or skill or endurance, and that may not be true for certified divers, but when you're learning it all at once... whoof. I have never been so tired as I was this weekend.
My weekend sleep times:
Friday: midnight - five am. Couldn't sleep any later.
Saturday: 9 - 6 am. In bed as soon as dinner was finished. Could have slept right beside the pool, if there had been a bed.
Sunday: 8 - 5am. I'm not sure I even lasted until 8. I could have gone to bed as soon as we got home and showered, but Malaya wanted a celebratory dinner out, and I managed to stay awake through that thanks only to free Pepsi refills.
We had to get up each day at 7am to get to the dive store by 8am, and we made it, more or less. Saturday we spent the first hour and a half getting ready. Trying out and renting wetsuits, BCDs, tanks, etc, and then learning to hook up the air to the tank to the vest, reading the pressure gauges, putting on all the wetsuit stuff, adjusting our masks and snorkels, etc. We were in the water until around 2pm to finish the first two sets of exercises, then after 30 minutes for lunch we got back in until nearly 6, and took all of our suits, air tanks, etc home, since we were due back Sunday at 8 and the shop didn't open until 11.
Saturday night though, we thought we knew what tired was. (We'd learn more about that Sunday, when we could add sore backs to fatigue.) Dragging home from the dive shop pool that evening, we tried to figure what was so tiring about it. We hadn't been to firefighter training, busy running up six flights of stairs with 50 pounds of hose on our shoulders. We were even standing in four feet of water most of the time. Scuba training is just slowly and steadily exhausting, thanks to the 25 pound weight belt, 40 pound tank, constricting wetsuit, slow movements as you push through the water, and perform a seemingly-endless litany of unfamiliar scuba skills, all of which must be concentrated on and done correctly before the instuctor will move on to the next item.
We got home after 7pm on Saturday, and I was literally in bed by 9, and asleep by 9:05. I stayed there, quite happily, until 7am Sunday, when we got up and ate and headed back for day two of the pool exercises, which ran until nearly 4pm. After that we came home, showered, washed our hair twice, went out for a celebratory Mexican dinner, and came back home, after which I promptly went to bed, this time by 8:30. *snore*
Sunday was even more tiring than Saturday, thanks to added fun of cold water gear. Our full body wetsuits were augmented by a second layer, which covers you from the knees up over the chest like a vest, and includes a hood that fits tightly enough that your hair hardly gets wet, even after ten minutes kneeling in the deep end. Everyone hated their hoods; they were tight, heavy, and basically made it feel like you had a weight on the back of your neck the whole time. I could hardly look down without fighting the stretching wetsuit, and that wears you out quickly.
We only wore them part of the time, since we were overheating in the sun on the surface in the heated pool, but it was plenty of time to learn how much we hated them. As the instructor said, "You sacrifice some comfort for warmth, in the Pacific." As Malaya said, "We're so going to Hawaii to dive."
In a perfect world, Sunday would have been done by early afternoon. In reality, there were delays galore as we all had to get more weights to counteract the added bouyancy of our extra suits, air tanks ran out, the more difficult proficiencies required multiple attempts, and so on. We ended up going from 8-4 without any break longer than a few minutes, and while the last 30 minutes were spent in the pool without any gear on, we had to swim 200 meters, and then tread water for 10 minutes as the final portions of our testing. Why they saved that for the time when we were all struggling simply to get in and out of the water, I couldn't tell you. I guess we now know we could swim that far or tread water for that long even after a really tiring day, though. And really, you don't need to be able to swim to scuba, since you've got floating stuff on, and even if you ran out of air you'd just drop your weight belt and float like a cork, in your highly-buoyant wetsuit.
We made it though, and a good thing, since this weekend the scuba training continues and concludes with 4 more dives into the ocean, down south in Monterey. The sleeping schedule fun will continue too, since we've got to be in the water at 8am both days. Which means we've got to leave here around 6 on Saturday, which means we've got to get up around 5am. On a weekend. This is recreation?
Happily, by this time next week we'll be registered and qualified sport divers, and will never need to take any scuba classes or exercises again, if we don't want to. (We probably will though, to get qualified for night diving, wreck diving, to learn to take underwater photos, qualify as rescue divers, etc.)
I can't really recommend scuba yet, since aside from a few minutes of floating weightlessly near the bottom of the pool, it's been nothing but expensive equipment and toil, thus far. We're sticking with it for now, with most of our training already done, and we keep telling each other that this is just the learning, and of course it's not much fun. It's all worst case scenario stuff now, with all skills being practiced that we will hopefully never use again. After all, there's no real reason you'd ever take off your weight belt, or rip off your mask underwater, or remove your BCD/tank, or run out of air and have to share a regulator with your dive buddy. You just have to learn and practice what to do in those situations, just in case disaster strikes.
It's exhausting and there's so much to learn, and it adds up. Nothing is that hard by itself, but it's time-consuming and tiring. Nothing is that individually challenging, you've just got to do it correctly, and when you're not used to being underwater, breathing from a tank, etc, it's a lot to manage at once. And you're doing one new thing after another for like 3 or 4 or 7 hours straight. It gets really hard to maintain concentration, and on Sunday, while we were standing around, sweating in the hot wetsuits, bent over with 60 or 70 pounds on our backs, I gained rapid insight into why the instructors take off their tanks and weight belts the first chance they get, and put them back on only when they absolutely need them on.
As for learning scuba, I definitely recommend that if you want to learn it, you do not do it as we're doing it. We took classes through a local college that does not have a pool or diving equipment to use there. So we did all the bookwork in advance, a chapter a week over 5 weeks, and then had all 5 units of water learning to cram into one weekend. Exhausting and stressful and sleep-depriving. The usual way to learn is at a dive shop, on a three week schedule. You do two classes a week that way, with a pool session after each one. So you're learning the skills as you read about them, and with just 2-3 hours in the water each time, you're not exhausting yourself with a full day in the water.
Numerous times this weekend, Malaya and/or me were quite ready to take all of that shit off and never think about scuba again. It's just so tiring to stand there in all that gear, or to kneel at the bottom of the deep end for 10 more minutes, sucking air and trying to keep your breathing slow while waiting for other people to get their weight belt recovery roll down, or manage to put their BCD back on under water, or whatever.
It should all be a lot more fun next weekend though, and then vastly more fun when we someday get to vacation somewhere warm and tropical, where we can dive in just a light wetsuit. Wearing the double layer stuff (as we were doing for testing, not warmth, at least not while in the heated pool) is like being a little kid in a heavy snow suit, where you hardly feel like you can move your arms, or bend over forward, and with maybe 60 pounds of gear on your back/around your waist, you can easily imagine falling over backwards and not being able to get back up by yourself.
Hopefully this weekend will be a lot less tiring, since we've already learned most of the hard stuff, and just have to prove we can do it in deeper water, with a current. The ocean should be a lot more fun too, with rocks and fish and stuff to look at, rather than just a dirty swimming pool. With any luck, by this time next week I'll be posting a raving blog entry about the joy of scuba, and discussing how eager we are to go do it again somewhere for real, etc.Labels: scuba
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