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| My bungalow |
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| Not wine... fish sauce! |
Rainbow Divers has the best reputation for dive operations in Vietnam and offers a 3-4 day open water course certified by PADI, the Professional Association of Dive Instructors. I don’t actually know what that means but it sounds good. I don’t even unpack before hiking down the beach to the Rainbow Café to sign up. Five to six hours of SCUBA training a day will still leave me plenty of time in the afternoons and evenings to sit on the beach and read books or explore the island.
Well, maybe not the first day, I think, when they hand me my course kit. Among other things, a 300 page textbook full of important things I need to know to be a safe diver. Oh yeah, homework. I hadn’t included homework in my calculations. But that’s OK. My class will be done by 3:00 and then I’ll have all the rest of the day. I spend my first evening on Phu Quoc reading chapter one in my book.
Five or six hours a day sounds like a lot to me. But the first day is not five to six hours long. It is not even seven to eight hours long. I meet up with my instructor, Steve, at nine in the morning and trudge home through the dark sand somewhere around nine that night. Then I do my homework.
There is a lunch hour in there somewhere but I have homework then, too, so it doesn’t really count as a break. Day One is no less than fourteen hours long by the time I fall asleep, and practically every minute crammed with new words, concepts and physical skills. Not only that, but I’d been afraid of the water since I was in the first grade and a lady at the community pool tried to teach me to swim by dunking me under the surface three or four times. When I finally got away from her I ran to the lifeguard and told him that some crazy lady was trying to kill me. Later, my family would go to the lake every summer and I would float around in the murky brown lake water in my life vest with invisible fish nibbling at my toes. That wasn’t fun, but getting out of the water mean contending with the bees and mosquitoes. It was a constant trade-off.
I’d tried now and then over the years to become comfortable in water. Eventually, I had learned to swim a lap or two across a small swimming pool but I still got nervous if I couldn’t touch the bottom. The last time I’d tried swimming in open water was during a trip to the Adriatic. A group of us took a boat out to a pretty mound of rock in the middle of the warm, clear water that lies between Italy and Croatia. No sand or silt to stir up and ruin the visibility, but that also meant nothing to stand on once we were a couple of yards from shore. I tried to swim out with the others but I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t swim. I couldn’t float. I couldn’t tread water. How the hell am I going to swim ten laps without touching the bottom (SCUBA test one), or float for ten minutes (test two), let alone feel comfortable tossing around freely in the open ocean?
I don’t think about those things. I just figure I’ll do my best and if I can’t do it I can’t do it. At least I will have tried.
Skimming through the book over lunch, I realize that the course I’ve signed up for was actually designed to be completed over five swimming pool sessions and four open water dives. We only have two swimming pool sessions to get through all five of the segments, and four days in total to complete the course. This isn’t going to be fun and relaxing, I realize. This is going to be hard work.
Day One of SCUBA class feels like boot camp, especially once we get to the swimming pool session. No fluff time to just swim around and get comfortable breathing under water through a regulator. We jump right in to breathing under water through a regulator with my mask off, and getting water out of my regulator when someone kicks it out of my mouth under water and I have to put it back in, and finding it if it somehow floats away from me. Things like that.
Breathing through my mouth when my nose is in the water is much harder than I would have thought. All those involuntary muscles in charge of breathing for the last 42 years are working against me. I finally get to where I can do it without popping back up to the surface choking and gagging, but only because I see that we’re not going to move on until I can do it. I don’t have to like it, but I have to be able to do it.
OK, good, now let’s see how it feels when I run out of air. We sit at the bottom and drillmaster Steve turns off the air supply on my tank. Fine, we’d talked about that. It feels like I’m suffocating. I wait until breathing is obviously difficult and then signal to him, “out of air, share air.” He turns me back on again.
Pretending to run out of air was not as bad as it sounds. Now we move on to clearing my mask underwater. God I hate doing that. First of all, we’re back to breathing through my mouth while I have a nose full of water, only this time the fact that my nose is in a mask makes it feel even more awful. Second, I wear contacts, so filling my mask with water means I have to close my eyes until I’ve completed the exercise.
But we’re obviously not moving on until I can do it.
We start out with just a half mask. We sit at the bottom and Steve demonstrates. So calm, just as it should be. He cracks open the seal of his mask just above eye level and half fills it with water. Crosses his arms for a moment to show me that it’s no big deal and he could sit there like that all day long. Then he lifts the bottom of his mask, tilts his head up and blows out of his nose. Ta da! Water gone.
Now it’s my turn.
I take a deep, anxious breath and remind myself not to try to breathe from my nose. I close my eyes and pull open the entire top half of my mask. I can’t tell if it fills halfway or a third or full because my eyes are closed, but I don’t care. I take a very deliberate breath or two through my mouth, reminding myself again, not through the nose, not through the nose. OK, lift the bottom of the mask, tilt the head, and give a big graceless snort. Bleh. Where am I supposed to breathe again? Mouth? Nose? I can’t remember any more and there’s still water in my mask. Cough, cough, choke, sputter and I’m shooting back up to the surface glaring at Steve. Why is he being so mean to me?
Steve is just looking back at me, calm and patient. “What happened there?”
“I don’t know.”
“You pulled the top open too far and your hair got in your mask.”
Apparently, I have thick lustrous hair that grows really far down my head. Hoorah, I don’t have to worry about going bald but it’s making my mask fit poorly. “With all that hair you’ll never get a good seal that way. Just crack it open, like this,” and he demonstrates. “OK, catch your breath and let’s try that again.”
And down we go.
Over and over until I get so tired of sucking up chlorine that I force myself to do it right a couple of times in a row.
The irony is that when we’re just swimming around I can clear my mask just fine. Every couple of minutes I crack the seal at the bottom and blow out a little bit through my nose, no problem. But of course, it could happen that it fills up all the way while I am sixty feet below the surface and I need to be able to deal with that, too, without freaking out about it. From that depth I wouldn’t be able to just pop back up to the surface without hurting my lungs. Like with flying emergencies, the trick is to stay calm and follow the proper procedure. I can do that. Breathe through my mouth, calmly clear my mask, and all’s well again.
We move on and on through what feels like a huge list of required skills. By the end of the day I can do most things alright but I can’t do anything well, and after fourteen hours of maximum effort and attention that feels pretty shitty. I doze off mid-way through my homework – the remaining three fifths of the textbook – feeling exhausted, clumsy and under prepared.
My first day of SCUBA class is not fun. Fortunately, my PADI daddy doesn’t let me give up.
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| Drillmaster Steve signing my logbook |
“We’ll do your first ocean dives tomorrow like we planned. Then, if there’s anything we still need to work on in the pool we’ll meet up for an extra session in the evening.” He doesn’t talk about cost, but I suspect he gets paid by the person, not by the session, so any extras are on his own time. I don’t think it is a money thing for him, though; I think he’s a dedicated teacher.
It wasn’t exactly a pep talk, but just knowing that we could be a little bit flexible if I needed it relieved some of the anxiety I had around getting into the ocean. I was tired from working so hard the day before, but I felt much more comfortable with the whole thing. I also, for some reason, didn’t have any mental apprehension about the most difficult things we needed to do that day: emergency ascents and breathing from someone else’s tank while swimming.
According to the textbook, these are the skills people have the most trouble with, but I knew before we started that I would find them relatively easy. I was fine with the idea of having the regulator out of my mouth and blowing bubbles so my lungs don’t accidentally explode. I was fine with exchanging it for an alternate air source… my alternate, his alternate, his primary, anything but the snorkel. My snorkeling skills were still pretty poor. I had trouble with the simple stuff – finding and reading my submersible pressure gauge, finding the inflator/deflator hose for my buoyancy vest, swimming in a straight line – but I wasn’t too worried about responding to emergencies, using dive tables or navigating with a compass. I even looked forward to seeing the look on Steve’s face when I finally did something well on the first try.
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As difficult as the first day was for me, the second day is almost easy. Well, it is manageable. We start with snorkeling and that doesn’t go well, but I’m still feeling OK about the rest and once we move on to the emergencies it’s all downhill from there. Steve gives me the signal to demonstrate a Controlled Emergency Swimming Ascent (CESA) and I go at it. I pretend I’m out of air and my dive buddy is too far away for me to get to his alternate air source. I suck the simulated last breath out of my tank and blow a slow, constant stream of bubbles, making a long “ahhh” sound to help pace myself. I elevate my buoyancy vest deflator hose, look up, put my hand above my head to keep from hitting anything that might be on the surface, and simulate an ascent, swimming horizontally across the pool until Steve signals “cut.”
Steve has a hard time hiding his surprise. I’m sure he expected me to struggle through everything just like I had the first day, and had probably already canceled whatever plans he may have had for the following evening, anticipating a long after-hours review session. “That was great,” he says. What did you do with the woman I was working with yesterday, he keeps to himself, but it’s printed on his forehead in big bold letters.
Now I’m on a roll. We do an ascent using my dive buddy’s alternate air source, which I would have to do if I was careless and ran completely out of air in my own tank. Shake shake on Steve’s vest to get his attention. Then the hand signals, “out of air, share air.” He moves his right arm up to expose his alternate regulator, called an octo because it supposedly looks like an octopus. I grab it, press the purge button to get the water out of it, put it in my mouth in place of my own, and start breathing. We do that sitting still, we do it while swimming across the pool and we do it while ascending to the top. No problem. Then we use a similar technique called buddy breathing, which is what I would do if I ran out of air and my dive buddy didn’t have an octo. Buddy breathing is the only skill listed as optional in the PADI syllabus. Steve likes to include it because he’s thorough.
We start off the same way, shake shake, signal, “out of air, buddy breathing needed.” Steve takes one last breath from his regulator, then puts it in my mouth, keeping his hand on the hose. I blow out the water with whatever is left in my lungs and take two breaths, then hand it back to him. Blow small bubbles while he takes two breaths and hands it back to me. We do that for a couple of cycles and then switch.
Now he’s out of air and I’m the one who showed up without an alternate. That all goes well so we stay under water in the deep end to practice taking off my buoyancy vest and weights and putting them back on again. Under the water, no problem. Floating at the surface, harder but still no problem. He has me take the weights off again and hand them up to the side of the pool and we’re done for the day. “Well done,” he says, still a little surprised. “I think you’re ready for your ocean dives tomorrow.” And to my own surprise, I agree with him.
Back at my bungalow, I feel more confident in the water already. I’ve watched the sun set over the Pacific so many times from California beaches, but the water there is too cold to swim in. Usually, I’m resting on a piece of driftwood that washed up on shore, or on a cliff, or just sitting in the cool sand. Today, I feel like celebrating my new confidence by watching the sun set over the Pacific from eye level in the Pacific. I go for a swim, far enough out that I can’t touch the bottom anymore, and slowly make my way back as the sun gets bigger and redder and closer to the horizon.
Sometimes the sun looks like it’s making itself a platform for the last few seconds as it approaches an ocean horizon, as if the sea reaches up to grab it before it even gets there. Sometimes it becomes elongated until it’s more the shape of a hot air balloon than a sphere of fire. It’s all in the way the light plays in the atmosphere as it makes its way down those final few moments.
Today it makes a platform of deep red, staying buttery yellow at the top, with enough haze in the atmosphere that I can look directly at it without hurting my eyes. The sea pulls it down rapidly but a halo of brightness all round the yellow part leaves an aura to mark where it disappeared. The water is pink and powdery blue, then purple, then black. I get out of the dark waves and get ready for dinner, tired, happy and very, very hungry.
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Day Three starts with claps of thunder splitting the sky just across the street from the breakfast deck at Soa Bien bungalows. Maybe it’ll rain, I think, but who cares… we’re going under the water anyway. It doesn’t make sense to me, but I am not nervous about my first open water dive. I slept well, feel relaxed walking over to meet the boat. I know we are “only” going eight to ten meters down, which seems manageable. I believe that the water will be calm and clear. Mostly, though, I really trust Steve by now. He has the same kind of calm demeanor that good flight instructors have. He is patient without letting me get away with too much whining and makes me feel confident that he can handle any situation that might come up.
Steve is originally from Belgium, but he moved to Africa for an adventure and stayed there working as a bush guide. His favorite place in the world is a hut near Lake Malawi with no electricity or running water. I have the sense that he understands animals and could probably handle any encounters we might have with large or angry sea creatures. Not that dangerous encounters are likely in the place we’re going, but the thought has crossed my mind. The clouds let loose with a burst of rain just as I arrive.
A small motorboat chugs back and forth picking divers up from the beach and taking us to the dive boat anchored about a quarter mile from shore where Steve waits with a smile and a wave hello. I’m the only student diver on board. But even though most of the others are certified divers already, there is a distinct quiet among them. They’re nervous, I realize. Just like pilots who haven’t flown for a while, they won’t be able to relax until they’ve convinced themselves they’re not too rusty.
Steve briefs me on our first dive while the boat makes its way to Turtle Island. “We’re not going to do a lot of skills on this dive,” he says. “We’ll go down, have a look around, just give you a chance to get comfortable under the water.” Good, that’s what I needed to hear. He goes over each and every step, “You’ll get into the water with a giant step, just like we did in the pool, right hand on your mask, left hand on your weight belt. Once you’re in the water, inflate your BCD (buoyancy vest) and signal the dive master that you’re OK. Swim over to the front of the boat and hold onto the anchor line. Deflate your BCD, then we’ll do a normal descent, nice and slow, along the line. Don’t forget to equalize the pressure in your ears every couple of feet. Once we get to the bottom…” and he goes on.
I didn’t feel nervous this morning. I thought I had it all. But when the boat drops anchor I suddenly forget everything Steve just said.
Everyone starts jumping in, and then it’s our turn. Steve takes a giant step into the water and looks up at me. Fortunately, I don’t have time to hesitate. Mr. Lam, the divemaster, is holding my tank and reminding me what Steve just said a moment before. Somehow he knws I have already forgotten. “Right hand on your mask please; left hand on your weight belt.” Then he counts, “one, two, three,” and with three I go. I hit the water, inflate my BCD, and give Mr. Lam the OK signal.
I deflate my BCD timidly at first for our descent. Steve signals to deflate it all the way. Yeah, I know, I’m thinking… just give me a minute. We start downward, using the anchor line as a reference. Once we’re completely submerged everything is quiet, calm, peaceful. Nothing exists more than five or six meters away. Schools of tiny anchovy fish swim around us, not minding us a bit. Steve swishes his hand just above a patch of sand to see if anything is living there, then motions for me to sit down and catch my breath. The sand at the bottom is brighter and more course than beach sand.
We establish neutral buoyancy, which makes us essentially weightless, like astronauts, although I’m not that good at it yet. I don’t put quite enough air in my BCD and I start sinking back to the bottom. I don’t want to hurt whatever might be living there so I suck in a really deep breath, hoping the extra air in my lungs will lift me up again in time, but I’m too late. I bump my chest onto the ocean floor briefly before bobbing back upward again.
Like learning to fly, taking a SCUBA class makes me rethink my whole concept of how the human body controls where it is in space. As ground bound creatures, we spend most of our lives moving horizontally along the surface of the earth, while gravity keeps us sucked vertically against its surface. Pilots learn to “defy” gravity by moving through the air. Where an airplane is vertically depends on how much air is passing around its wings and where its nose is pointed. One of the first things a pilot learns how to do is fly a straight line at a constant altitude, which isn’t as easy as most people think it sounds.
It’s the same in SCUBA. Under water, though, a diver controls where she is vertically by making changes in buoyancy. Learning how to control buoyancy is one of the most important skills learned in a SCUBA course, but like flying straight and level, it’s not as easy as it might sound. In addition to the little bit of air in my BCD, the air in my lungs affects my buoyancy as well. Under water, I control where I am vertically, in part, by controlling my breathing. Breathe out more than I breathe in and I descend. Breathe in more than I breathe out and I rise.
I am amazed at how effective my lungs are at rising and descending me in the water. The trick is that there’s a delay between changing the amount of air in my lungs and the resulting change in buoyancy. Soon I’m getting the hang of it, though, pacing my breaths so that I neither sink all the way to the bottom or rise back up too quickly toward the top.
It is also possible to injure the lungs under water, which is another reason why breath control is so important. As I descend into the water, its pressure increases dramatically. The pressure in my body tissues increases, too, because my body is mostly made out of water.
But every air pocket I bring with me below the surface presents either a problem or an opportunity, and in some cases both. My lungs are air pockets. If I don’t increase the air pressure in my lungs as I descend, to match the increasing pressure of my body tissues, my lungs will literally get squeezed. That’s easy to deal with as long as I keep breathing, because the air in my tank is compressed and automatically delivers air into my lungs at exactly the right pressure as I descend.
Going up, the problem is reversed. The pressurized air I breathed at ten meters will expand as I ascend until my lungs are so full they burst. Fortunately, that’s easy to deal with, too, as long as I keep breathing. If I ascend rapidly, I could breath out all the way to the surface and still have my lungs full of air when I got there.
It’s not quite that simple, though. Divers under water are what pilots would call negatively stable. Say I’m sitting on the bottom ten meters below the surface and I propel myself up one meter. All other things being equal, the air in both my BCD and my lungs will expand because the water pressure pushing against it is less at nine meters than it is at ten. Now that that air has expanded, I’m more buoyant than I was at ten meters, so I’ll have a tendency to go up even more. The further up I go, the lower the water pressure, the faster my air pockets expand and pretty soon I could be whizzing up out of the surface like a rocket, tearing delicate lung tissue every foot of the way.
So what do you do when you start feeling yourself popping up and breathing out doesn’t stop you? That’s when it’s time to dump all the air in your BCD and fast.
I discover that this is a sure way to get Steve’s attention when I try inflating my BCD orally instead of through my inflator hose, another required skill. I guess I really had no idea how little air I was squirting into the BCD using the hose, because I take the biggest breath I can out of my regulator and blow every bit of it into my BCD. Right away, I start drifting upward like Charlie and Uncle Joe in Willy Wonka’s bubble machine. I go to grab for my deflator hose but even though it’s attached to my shoulder I’m still not very good at locating it as quickly as I need to. Steve’s hand appears out of nowhere grabbing my vest and pulling me back down with a look that clearly says, “Don’t do that again!” No hand signals necessary. We try it again with just a little bit of air and it works much better.
Other than bobbing up and down too much from time to time, the first dive goes really well. We see fishes and corals and giant sea sponges in amazing shapes. We do a normal ascent with a three minute safety stop close to the surface, not required but a good practice. Back on the boat I feel a huge sense of relief and accomplishment. I actually did it. After four decades fearing deep water I dove below the surface and didn’t panic. If I stop right now I’ll be happy, but there’s another dive ahead of me today. That one will be harder. I have to demonstrate some of the skills I learned in the pool, including filling my mask with water and clearing it out again while I’m too far below the surface to pop up to cough and sputter.
If I can show Steve I can do the required skills – not like them, but do them – then by the end of the week I’ll be a certified diver and can go off and do this whenever and wherever I want to. I can see the giant kelp forests in Monterey Bay. I can fly down to dive near Catalina Island just off the coast of Southern California. I could go to Baja and dive in the Sea of Cortez. Maybe one day I could see Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and the corals of Indonesia. All I have to do is force myself not to panic. Demonstrate I know what to do and can stay in control and a whole new part of the world opens up for me to explore.
The second dive is harder than the first, but it goes OK. There are some strong cross currents, and at one point Steve is being drifted in one direction and me in another. In the four seconds he looks away from me we get pretty far apart, even though I’m trying as hard as I can to keep up. But I wouldn’t be down here if I didn’t trust him. I know he’ll be looking back in another second or two and he does. We get out of the cross currents so that we’re both being carried in the same direction. For a little while we don’t even have to kick, we’re passing by corals at a pretty good clip just being carried along with the water. I decide that drift diving – like riding an underwater jet stream – would be amazing fun, but I’m getting way ahead of myself.
There’s also a surge on this dive, basically a wave underwater that rolls us along with it. I have to be careful not to let it smash me into rocks or corals, but since I can’t really swim against it all I can do is ascend to avoid hitting things at the bottom.
We do a lot of skills on this dive and it tires me out. I’m supposed to perform a “tired diver tow” at the end of it, pulling or pushing Steve back to the boat. I tow him the right distance, but the current is strong at the surface and we don’t end up as close to the boat as we should. Now I have to demonstrate taking off my weight belt and putting it back on while floating at the surface, gagging on sea water that spits itself into my mouth. I did this easily in the pool, but the belt I’m wearing today has a frayed edge so it’s hard to get it back on. Steve just waits patiently, bobbing in the waves while he watches me, motioning to Mr. Lam that we’re not done yet so don’t rush us. When I finally get that, I’m supposed to take off my BCD and put it back on, too, but I’m out of breath and he generously lets me defer that to tomorrow. Like me, all the other divers on the boat are much more relaxed and talkative now that their dives are done. We have a good lunch together featuring various kinds of Vietnamese mystery meats and cold Tiger Beer and we talk about travel and diving all the way back to Phu Quoc.
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| "Well done, open water diver!" |
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