3 Feet for 15 Seconds

Okay...here we go.

I will try and use this blog to chronicle my immersion (pun intended) into the world of SCUBA diving.

I was certified as a PADI Open Water diver on April 22, 2007. That was the date when my oldest son Cameron and I completed our checkout dives at Ginnie Springs, near Gainesville, Florida.

Cameron and I decided to become SCUBA divers so we could have something to do on our vacation this year. We were going on a 7-day Western Caribbean cruise...our destinations were to include Haiti, Jamaica, the Cayman Islands and Cozumel...but I digress.

We took our Open Water course through Sea Hunt Scuba, in St Augustine. Our instructors were Curtis Deyo for PADI Open Water and Steve Bohannan for National Geographic.


I'm writing this post nearly 4 months after our first experiences, so I'll try and summarize them in a nutshell

• Dives 1-4 - Ginnie Springs, FL - like I said earlier, not much to see. Skills training and practice. Saw a few brim, bass and crawfish. The Santa Fe River, which is fed by the various springs at Ginnie (we dove Devil's Eye, Little Devil, Devil's Ear and Little Devil), is pretty nasty. I saw a lawnchair and empty beer cans on the bottom as we crossed the river to get to July Spring. Baby steps. I guess the really memorable part of this trip was completing our training, and the mother of one of our fellow students. You know the type. She must have overheard Curtis giving us some last minute instruction before we braved the 5' deep entrance to the spring. As her son was getting into the water she started screaming at him..."Don't forget to do your safety stop! 3 feet for 15 seconds!" Nevermind that we would be going no deeper than 20' for that first dive. Or that a safety stop is supposed to be 15 feet for 3 minutes. Details.

• Dives 5-7 - Pompano Beach, FL - on the diveboat Coral Princess from South Florida Diving Headquarters we embarked on our first real adventure into the big swimming pool. It was a 3-tank trip that would qualify us as National Geographic divers. We visited the shipwreck Ancient Mariner, did a drift dive on the Sea Ranch reef and finally dove on the wreck of the SS Copenhagen. Baby steps. I got a horrible mask squeeze (what is a mask squeeze? Check this out http://www.diversalertnetwork.org/medical/faq/faq.asp?faqid=46) on the trip down the line on Ancient Mariner. On the Sea Ranch we did see a sea turtle. I saw my first trumpetfish on the Copenhagen. Mainly though, this trip was about getting our sea legs (no pun intended) and getting comfortable in the water. More baby steps. The maximum depth on this series of dives was 70' on the Ancient Mariner. These dives were on a Thursday, and we were set to leave for our cruise on the following Sunday. So Cameron and I decided not to drive home, instead staying the night in Boca Raton. Which was perfect, because we got to dive on Friday!

• Dives 8-9 - Lantana, Florida - on the diveboat Starfish Enterprise we made our first excursions into the deep without our instructors. I was still showing the effects of the previous day's mask squeeze, but that didn't stop us from enjoying two excellent drift dives on the Seagate Reef near Boynton Beach and the Briney Gazebo reef. We had max depth on both dives of 65'. Visibility was around 25'...not great, not bad. I saw another sea turtle on this dive, and saw my first blue parrotfish. This was also my first trip into the water without the familiar equipment from our Sea Hunt training, and it convinced me that purchasing my own equipment was a must in the near future.

• Dives 10-11 - Georgetown, Grand Cayman - our raison d'etre...this was why we had gotten certified. SCUBA diving in the Cayman Islands. It lived up to its billing and then some. We rented equipment from the Mariner of the Seas, and it furthered our belief that we needed our own equipment. Off of the diveboat Hawk we did a 68' dive to Round Rock reef, and then a 50' dive to the wreck of the drugship Ossoverde. At the Round Rock, which was at the western end of Seven Mile Beach, we swam through underwater arches, and saw our first barracuda and a large Jack Crevalle. At Ossoverde we saw a loggerhead turtle, grouper, parrotfish and grunts. The visibility was 60' plus. You could read the name Hawk off of the boat's transom while sitting on the bottom. Only bad thing on this trip was having to wait nearly an hour in a driving rain for a tender back to Mariner of the Seas.
  

So there it is...10 dives in, 356 minutes of bottom time. May 24, 2007.