In the last four weeks, I’ve completed a weekly theory
session and three confined water (that’s swimming pool to you and me) dives and
I can’t wait to learn more. It helps that the guys at the dive centre I’m training
with know their stuff and make it enjoyable. As one of my instructors said the
other week, if you know how to have a laugh, it makes scuba diving all the more
fun, and this course has certainly provided a few good laughs so far, on dry
land and in the water, mainly at my expense. It’s a running joke in my family
that intelligence doesn’t equal common sense. I’ve provided hours of
unintentional entertainment with my Homer Simpson-inspired ‘doh’ moments.
Last week I spent half of the pool session upside down. In
my infinite wisdom I decided to test out my new (eBay-new) 7mm wetsuit. A
standard summer wetsuit is 3mm, a winter one 5mm, a 7mm is made for scuba
diving...in the sea, not in a swimming pool. The thicker the wetsuit the more
buoyant you are. In other words, you float, but in this case in an up, up and
away style. It’s fine when you’ve got an air tank on your back and weights on
to keep you down, not so much when you have to do an exercise where you remove
your Buoyancy Control Device (BCD) and put it back on again underwater. Cue
head down, flippers up (I know, flippers are for dolphins, scuba divers wear
‘fins’, but seriously – fins?), trying to put the jacket back on whilst
‘standing’ upside down. My classmate found out how hard it is to laugh underwater
with a regulator in your mouth whilst trying desperately not to choke that day.
A pre-requisite of the course is that you must be able to
swim 200 metres non-stop and float for 10 minutes on your back at the surface.
The 200 metres was by no means easy, even in a wetsuit, but the floating was a
different story altogether. This is where a thick wetsuit helps considerably –
you just lay back and think of...anyway, not that I knew it but 10 minutes
passed, I’m relaxed, I have my eyes closed, my ears are underwater, I’m being
tapped on the arm. I look up to four instructors lining the side of the pool
cheering my return to reality. It really is difficult to hear anything with
your ears underwater!
Misinterpretation is a good one for humour. The instructor
asked what I would do if I had a problem with my ear underwater. Only I thought
he’d said a problem with your ‘rear’. I spent the next few minutes chuckling
away to myself and had to ask for the question to be repeated before I could
attempt a remotely intelligible answer.
Everyone loves a bit of innuendo too. In my case it’s often
purely accidental. I had a problem with my regulator, so had to switch my
equipment for the instructor’s so it’d be easier for me to breath. ‘Get your
kit off’, he tells me, followed by an ‘in the nicest possible sense’. We traded
equipment and I couldn’t find the submersible pressure gauge which shows you
how much air you have left. The instructor handed it to me and, realising it’s
a lot smaller than the standard training ones, my response? - ‘You’ve got a
tiny one.’ I can’t say I twigged until I got a confused ‘excuse me?’ in return!
Foot in mouth, that’s me.
Oh, back on the 7mm wetsuit. They really are difficult to
put on. A friend advised (and I use the term advised in the loosest possible
sense) me that by putting plastic bags on my feet the wetsuit would slip on
easier. I think it helped slightly, but he didn’t tell me it’d be difficult to
remove the bags once you’d got it on. Some tugging later and I managed to pull
them out. Taking the wetsuit off at the end of the session was a lot easier.
One foot, two feet, carrier bag handle...yes, I had gone through the session
with the leftovers of the bag in my wetsuit.