Advanced diving

Another scuba weekend, this time to go for my advanced certification. This blog post will be different because it's minimal pictures. I didn't take my GoPro this time because I was doing more dangerous dives and wanted to focus. 

So I only have above water pictures this time

So I did 6 dives in 2 days, all pretty stressful.

Dive 1: peak buoyancy. This first dive was not that bad actually. We were learning how to be properly weighted and how to swim without flailing so much. Luckily this was very easy for me and I passed with flying colors.

Dive 2: night dive. This was the first stressful dive. We waiting until the sunset and dove into the darkness. It was a very weird feeling to only be able to see what my flashlight lit up. The craziest thing we did was sit on the bottom and turned off all lights. There was bioluminescent algae in the water, and when we churned up the water with our hands they lit up like fireflies. There was one scary moment where a fish ran into my mask and knocked it slightly off while we were in the dark. But I didn't panic! I also saw a horn shark (it was very small) and a manta ray during this dive.

Next day we woke up and it was not a nice day at all

But that doesn't stop the diving.

Dive 3: the deep dive. This one was the one that scared me the most. We went down to 125 feet all at once. The key for me was to not look up. We had balloons tied to us and we got to watch them deflate as we went down and the pressure increased. We also cracked open eggs down there and they stayed completely in tact! It was really cool but I was glad to get out of these. The deep is not somewhere I want to be for a long time.

Dive 4: wreck dive. This was a fun dive. We got to explore 2 wrecked sail boats and swim through them. Lots of lobsters and eels were on the wreck. They were super cool, and I was sad I didn't have my GoPro for this one.

Dive 5: navigation dive: the final dive we had to pass was to be able to swim in two large squares using only a compass. I was the only one to pass on the first try, swimming perfect squares every time. 

After that, I was officially certified as a advanced diver!

Here is me in our graduation picture.  My new wetsuit makes me look like a power ranger. 

The final dive was just for fun. We fed the fish, swam through a kelp forest and just had lots of fun!

But I was glad to be done because it was very cold all day

It was 60 degrees outside but 65 in the water.

And that night we went out on the town to celebrate our graduation 

The next day we had to get out of their fast. Even though it looked beautiful, a storm was rolling in fast and we had to leave before we got stranded 

Overall, a great trip! I got over a lot of diving fears and now I'm just ready to get some more diving in!