My First Breath Under Water~through Andi's eyes~:D

Unlike all of my sisters I had NO fear of water.
I was ready to get in that water, not sit there and read about it.
All the reading we had to do was just boring, but when the final test came, I was glad I did read that book. Tatiana, our teacher, said that if we get a 100% on our score , she'll buy us ice cream! So the test began. Everyone was quiet. We each had 50 questions in our booklets.
I started at the end- the 50th question, at all the harder questions where we had to use our Recreational Dive Planner tables. I had trouble on some of the questions But when the test was over, with out telling us Tatiana, our teacher, hopped on her bike and peddled away . When she came back ,guess what she had... Ice cream!!!! But the sad thing is none of us got a 100% :-( my score was... A 98 I got ONE questions wrong!
Now that the exams were over, it's time for the fun part - for us to get in the water! I tried on a couple different wet suits. The first one was too small. The 2nd one was too big, but the 3rd one....you guessed it, it was just right! We sized our flippers and mask and got equipped with our tanks ,the BCD( buoyancy control device), our weight belt, and the most important part, our regulators. I'll skip all the boring stuff of waiting on the dock, getting into the boat....WAIT...I can't skip the getting into the boat part! Rewind! It was my FIRST time in my life I've ridden in a boat! It was awesome! We went kinda slow on the way there because only one engine worked on the way there. I didn't mind going slowly because I could look off the edge of the boat and see the coral and colorful fish through the clear water. When we stopped and put on our gear, it was time! I was going to take my first breath under water! Bonnie was the first one in with her mask, and tank in water she slipped right off the edge of the boat into the clear, beautiful water. Once we all got in , we started swimming to the shore of the empty beautiful beachside. We stopped there so that we'd have 2 feet of water over our heads while we knelt down and did our exercises before we went on our dive to 40 feet. During the exercises, a tiny 2" tall seahorse swam up to us. Tatiana said that was very unusual to see and her first time in 3,000 dives to see one come up to a person. I got to hold it in my hands!! Underwater everything looks 33% bigger, so it was even smaller- an infant! And I saw a jellyfish! It was so see-through! At 40 ffeet under I saw a seaturtle , colorful fish and corals, sea fans, Christmas tree worms that look like a christmas tree an inch tall that live on a coral, but they fold up into the coral if you snap at them, and even garden eels with 1/2 of their body in the sand, their top 1/2 of their body waves with the movement of the water. They look like tons of grass, but as Tatiana and I swam over them, they pulled in their heads and disappeared into the sand because they're so shy. Then I felt the tap on my shoulder and saw the "thumbs up" sign and that means "let's go up"!
The next dive we had the boat was super fast. We had 2 engines then. I felt like we were flying across the ocean! We did the same thing with exercises, then going down under. We landed in a small patch surrounded by coral and lots of Caribbean fish. This time our exercises were fun ones! We got to float up and down in the center of the water with only our breath. Tatiana called it the "buddah position". Another fun exercise we did was the teacher turned off my airtank and I kept breathing until I felt I couldn't breath anymore! I gave her the "out of air" sign and right away she turned the valve and I was breathing full breaths again! Then we went down 40 feet and today it was a little more murkey, but I saw something called a "donkey dung"....eewwww! I didn't name that one! It's a sea cucumber. It looks like a humongus (foot long) dark seagreen catapillar. I got to feel it! It felt slimy! I also saw angel fish, and ,you know, all the 'normal' caribbean fish. Oh, it was beautiful. Like my sister Stephanie said, "Shallow pool, thou satisfieth me no longer. "But mom says a shallow pool didn't satisfy me even when I was little. She said I was a fish.
So that was MY diving experience. It was the BEST experience EVER!
Until next time,
Andi