SCUBA Certification
I have been wanting to take a SCUBA certification class for a long time but have been putting it off for one reason or another. An upcoming trip to Puerto Rico provided me with a great excuse to do it. I made a couple calls and decided to go with a local place called SCUBA Haus in Santa Monica. The class consisted of two consecutive weekends. The first weekend would take place in the Santa Monica Pool and the second at Casino Point on Catalina Island.
Of course, like every hobby that I have, SCUBA diving is full of opportunities to spend a ton of money on gear, but for this class you rent most of the stuff. The first thing you have to select is a wet suit from the rental collection that best suits you. If you are one of the four people who actually read my blog you are aware that I don’t have the physical dimensions of a normal human being. I’m a few species to the left of Cro-Magnon man just short of the Neanderthal. Imagine a photograph of Brad Pitt. Now imagine looking at that photograph in a funhouse mirror and you will begin to get the idea. Finding a skin-tight neoprene wet suit that fits me well wasn’t going to be easy.
Rocky, the owner of SCUBA Haus, recommended the extra large and directed me to the bathroom to try it on. After about twenty minutes of wrestling this thing in what could best be described as a scene out of “Weekend at Bernie’s”, I managed to get it on up to about my waist. I stood there panting and looking at myself in the mirror. I was exhausted and had started to work up a sweat. It looked like I was half-digested by a sea lion and he was the one taking a break due to the massive meal he was undertaking.
After a few minutes, I was able to get the rest of it on. I zipped it up with my last bit of strength and proudly strutted back into the store which was now full of customers to admire my new skin-tight sea lion costume. Rocky took one look at me, smirked, and said “Oh, the zipper goes in the back.” while the other customers tried to hold back their laughter (some better than others). Another few rounds in the bathroom and I walked back out with my arms extended like the younger brother in his snow suit from the movie “A Christmas Story.”
The rest of Friday night and Saturday morning consisted of lessons about the finer points of not dying underwater. The instructors were great and I would highly recommend them. Saturday afternoon was at the Santa Monica pool and the first time this newest generation of potential Navy SEAL candidates was to enter the water.
It turns out that swimming is a major part of SCUBA diving (everything else is pretty much not dying underwater) and in order to prove to them that you can swim they ask you to swim eight laps in any “style” that you choose. My stroke of choice is the “Vegas Crawl” since the majority of my adult pool experience takes places at The Mandalay Bay Hotel. To call my stroke of choice a choice is giving me a lot more credit for my athletic ability than I deserve, and to call it a stroke would be an insult to swimmers everywhere. A more accurate description is somewhere between the “dog paddle” and the “someone call the lifeguard”.
Around the middle of the fifth lap between desperate gasps for air and trying to keep my head above water I was starting to imagine how I would gracefully leave the class with the least amount of humiliation because there was no way I was going to make eight laps. Vegas pools are only four feet deep for a reason. Everyone else was done and Day Vinson, the Lead Instructor, said that it was good enough. I started to question her judgment.
Next, we suited up into our full gear and went into the bottom of the shallow end to learn how to panic, take off your mask, panic, put your mask back on, panic, and make silly hand signals that I am convinced the instructors make up on the fly in order to make us feel like idiots.
Now, I’m not an idiot, and it makes perfect sense to me that I don’t need a mask over my eyes to breathe through a tube that is in my mouth but my frog brain is a complete moron and this is the part which took over during this exercise. This led to an interesting argument between the part of my brain that made it through college (barely) and the frog brain. “Breathe you idiot.” “Nope, can’t breathe, must come to surface to flail and embarrass you, ribbit.” “Don’t you dare! Breathe through your mouth before your legs end up as an appetizer in a french restaurant!” “Ribbit”.
By the end of the day, they had us underwater in a circle, trading masks back and forth like my mom and her friends traded coupons from the Entertainment Book when I was a kid. I am still not quite comfortable with taking my mask off underwater. I have never been waterboarded, but I am guessing the sensation is similar.
The next day was more of the same with a few added skills thrown in to make sure you don’t die. By the end of the day we were swimming in circles in the deep end of the Santa Monica pool like a group of developmentally challenged sea lions waiting for a Great White with “Darwin Says Hi” painted on it’s side to make us it’s next meal. We were prepared for the next weekend in Catalina.
The first dive was at 8AM on Casino Point on Catalina Island. In order to get there by 8AM one would have to leave the wesside by 5AM to be at Long Beach in time to catch the Ferry. There was no way in hell I was doing that, so the wife and I went to Catalina Friday night and stayed in a hotel. Having Ann Marie there with me was a godsend and it made the whole experience a whole lot easier. She provided a great deal of tactical as well as emotional support.
I show up at Casino Point at around 7:45AM to meet the rest of my class who was on the ferry and it was already starting to get crowded. Casino Point has a marine park and is accessible via a convenient set of stairs which makes it a popular spot for SCUBA divers. The rest of the class rolled up a few minutes later and we all proceed getting swallowed by our assigned sea lions.
That first day consisted of a repeat of the not dying that we did in the pool. My frog brain was more submissive this time and It was pretty awesome. The weather was pretty cooperative and the visibility was really good (much better than Puerto Rico it turns out). The great thing about Casino Point is that you have a ton of different ecosystems in one place. After the dive a few of us met for dinner at a local place and crashed.
The next morning was designed to emulate a normal dive day. Starting with a 60 foot dive and then going shallower from there. I had a good nights sleep and I was ready to go. Our instructor, Day, gave us a run down of what we are going to be doing and then we waddled into the water to regroup. This was the beginning of the end for me.
The current was a little stronger on this day and the water was filled with a few more SCUBA-Douches. We had to do a surface swim a few yards out to find a Douche-free zone. If you had been paying attention you would remember that I am not the worlds greatest swimmer and this swim wore me out a little. Then when we regrouped the instructor started giving us more instruction. I was trying to be smart and conserve air so my BC (think balloon vest that keeps you floating) wasn’t fully inflated and my mouth was right at surface level. So I’m floating there, tired from the swim, trying not to swallow sea water, begging for Day to stop talking so I could dive and relax, when I started breathing really short. I started to panic and figured that if I can’t breathe on the surface what is going to happen at 60 feet. I made the announcement that I wasn’t going to make the dive and started one of the most humiliating experiences of recent memory.
Day took one look into my eyes and she knew I was serious. She asked a couple other people to use one of our newly learned rescue techniques that I now refer to “pushing the floating fat guy back to shore”. They inflated my BC all of the way and I pretty much lied down on the surface of the water while the able-bodied divers pushed my floating out of shape carcass back to the steps. Everyone in the water and on the steps asked if I was OK to make sure my humiliation had really set in. I had already decided at that point that I wasn’t going to get certified and going over in my head how I had been tweeting and facebooking about getting certified for the previous week and how pathetic my explanation was going to be.
After about 30 minutes, the rest of the group surfaced and individually consoled me. Day told me that it was my decision to keep going but at that point I had pretty much decided that I was too much of an out of shape loser to continue this sport. She didn’t push me and asked me to stick around for lunch anyway. This turns out to be a very effective technique. I was mentally prepared to stick to my guns and quit at that point and she chose not to fight me on it. We all had lunch and took the written test (which I passed). After lunch, Day looked at me and said “So are you getting back in or what?” Without thinking about it I said “sure.”
We did two more dives that day and by the second dive and I had no trouble at all. I was leading our group around the depths and navigating like a pro. I passed the class and am now certified open water shark bait! I am eternally grateful to Day for her light pressure and support.
If you are considering getting certified I highly recommend Day and her team as instructors. They are currently teaching out of Scuba Haus in Santa Monica.
