Scuba Diving 101

Ta-Da!

I've completed my first open water dive. My class went to Blue Springs and went
down the into the spring... but I get ahead of myself.

The class met at our lovely diving shop at the dreadful hour of 7:00 AM Sunday morning and I carpooled with another person and we all drove down to the spring together. When we got to the entrance, we stood in line to sign a release that we wouldn't take anything, disturb the environment, dive safely, etc. The park only lets in 35 divers at a time so the spring doesn't get too crowded. Of course, if you are a snorkeler or a swimmer, you can walk straight in. We parked at the entrance to the spring, got suited up, learned how to use an underwater compass, and walked a tenth of a mile to the source of the stream. The walk was the hardest part of the whole trip. We're suited up in 5 mil two-piece wet suits, with all of our equipment and extra
weight, and we walked... and walked... The wet suits are meant to conserve warmth in cold water, not in a warm May day in Florida. Everyone was happy to step into the cold spring water.

We got our masks and flippers on and did our skills testing in a shallow area of the spring, only 6 or 7 feet deep. Then we got to suit up and go into the spring depths!

Diving into the spring was an experience. The opening was 6 feet by 20, looking like a big scar in the ground, and we had to swim down against the spring water coming up to reach our desired depth. We swam facing down, and as we went down, it just kept getting darker and darker. There is NO way I would go down a black cavern with black hidden recesses unless I knew it was safe like this one. As we got near our lower limits for this dive, we could continue to look down into the spring openings and we could see other divers practicing their caving skills. More accurately, I could see the beams from their headlights shining around and moving. My description does the experience little justice, suffice it to say, it was great to watch and also highly tempting to drop a small, loose stone to see I could hit the invisible divers below.

I would have loved to have gone deeper, but 55 feet was the limit for this class. We held onto the side ledges or swam around so we didn't continue our free fall into the depths. When we came up, there were quite a few more divers arriving and snorkelers galore! The water was freezing and I have no idea how the snorkelers handled the cold without wet suits. It was pretty cool to see a snorkeler come down 40 feet into the spring and turn around about face level and wave just as he goes up again. :-) I just read this morning, that the deepest unaided dive record (no snorkel or fins ) was just set at 82 feet. At that point, it would be completely black. Along with contortion, hip hop, and Aikido, deep snorkeling is my new goal!

One unexpected problem was when I had a full wet suit on, snorkeling was very hard. The wet suit is mostly small pockets of air, and it was hard getting down the 15 feet necessary to meet the course snorkeling requirements, but the effort of swimming down was worth it. You could swim really fast towards a catfish, and if you coasted the last foot down or so, I could occasionally touch the catfish before he swam off. While scuba diving, I also saw two big crabs. The shell was probably 8 inches across. He was just sitting on a ledge about 25 feet down, just watching us pass him up and down. The swim back to the cars was pretty neat also. I saw two more big crabs and 3 schools a fish. Two of the schools were in the distance to the side and hard to see, but just seeing a wall of silver flashing was pretty cool. I swam towards a third one and got close and saw all the fish. It was a fun trip.

This Saturday we'll be diving a reef in the ocean. Whoo hoo!