Scuba Kathy takes a bath! Doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

The first rule of SCUBA diving is.... always look cool. :) This is extremely difficult when you've got your BCD and a 20 lb tank strapped to your back, as well as mask on, regulator in, and oh especially the fins. There's no way to look cool in them topside. But with some practice you can get in the water a lot faster, which is good, b/c in the water you look infinitely cooler in fins.

So I started my open water scuba diving course sometime last week, Saturday I think. First we spent about 2 hours in the classroom learning the first rule of diving (which is actually NEVER hold your breath) and some other important issues like pressure, what happens to air at depth, what happens to air on ascent, pressure vs volume relationships... everything that makes you feel like it might be the first day of fluid mechanics and not the first day of scuba lessons.

After lunch we went to the pool. First we had to prove we could float for 10 minutes. After successfully not sinking we kitted up in our gear: wetsuit, BCD- bouyancy control device, tank, mask and fins, checked our buddies (BCD, Weightbelt, releases, air, final ok... or the mneumonic Bangkok Women Really Are Fellas. I didnt make that up, I swear), and then performed a giant-stride entry into the deep end. Then we swam down to the shallow end and descended... kneeling on the bottom with about 1-2 ft of water over our heads. Then.. of course... PANIC! I'M DROWNING! Eeek! So I stand up. I wasnt actually drowning at all, I was just panicked by the thought of being underwater and wasnt breathing slowly and deeply. Mastering that I descended again and was doing much better until it was time to practice "mask clearing"... or what to do when your mask gets flooded with water. Here's a tip... DON'T BREATHE THROUGH YOUR NOSE! It doest work and it just flat out uncomfortable to boot. By the end of the pool exercises I was convinced that I am the worst diver ever and that scuba diving sucks... and that always brings me back to "what the hell am I doing?"

Anyway, I was glad to be out of my gear and even gladder to be able to console myself with some freshly grilled food at the nightly Buddha View Absolute BBQ. Some of you may already have heard about this phenomenon, but let me take a minute to rave about it for everyone. This BBQ is simply outstanding! It puts my meager attempts at grilling chicken to shame. There are many spicy looking thai dishes, but I forgo them all and head straight to the grill. They have fresh cuts of duck, chicken, chicken on a stick, beef and chicken kabobs, tbone, sirloin, filet mignon, prawns, tuna, king mackeral, and my new personal favorite marlin. Koh Tao is gorgeous, but the BBQ is the reason never to leave the island!

Ok, back to my adventures in SCUBA diving... of course now I am really hungry, so if I start to wander its b/c I'm thinking about the pizza I'm gonna have for lunch. Sunday afternoon we packed our bags and headed out on the boat for our first trip out to the ocean. We went to a very shallow spot so that the conditions really werent too much different from in the pool. We practiced the mask clearing again. With extreme focus and breath control I was successful, but I still got a bit of salt water up my nose. Ick. Mostly we spent the time practicing skills.. like the mask clearing and also what to do if you are out of air. I saw maybe 2 fish the whole time I was down there, and I was feeling better than in the pool but still not a big fan of the scuba.

Monday, we did some more classroom work... how to use dive tables, what is nitrogen narcosis? (its like being drunk underwater.. too deep and you start breathing compressed nitrogen.. which is otherwise known as "Laughing gas"), decompression sickness (nitrogen bubbles in the bloodstream), the 5 types of ascents in out of air situations, etc. I managed to make it through this final classroom session, but I was feeling pretty much like crap. Everytime I stood up my head would swim in pain and dizziness. To top that off I had a little pressure in my ears. So I cancelled out of diving that afternoon, with the intent of picking up the course again on Wednesday. Then I spent the whole day trying to figure out what terrible disease I could have. Alex said "sounds like blood pressure", WebMD said "swimmer's ear" or "merene's disease".. tam said "have you been drinking enough?" BINGO! Why hadnt I thought of that. Of course I was dehydrated... again. So I set about drinking all the water, gatorade and coconut juice I could handle. Problem solved but still feeling right shitty, on the night of the infamous full-moon party on neighboring Koh Phan-ngan I was laying on the floor of the Carabou Guesthouse watching Sinbad; the Legend of the 7 Seas. What an animal! The next morning I was miraculously recovered.. able to stand w/o holding on to stuff for balance and very glad that I didnt have to go see the island's doctor.

This brings us to Tuesday. No diving, fully recovered.. what was I to do? Of couse I got the brilliant idea to try to walk to another little beach. Sounded good. So I tried going west to get to Ao Thian. The guidebook says its perhaps the island's best beach... what better place to spend a few hours? Course they forgot to mentiton that when you get to the sign that says "turn left down this little dirt road" there is a barrier of barbed wire that says "dont you dare come down this little dirt road". Confused, I kept going up the hill and had a banana pancake for lunch at a guesthouse at the top of the cliff. Nice view but no beach. Ok, checking my map again I decide to head east.. back to Ao Ban Chalok and beyond to June Juea. Well being a bit thickheaded I dismissed the staircase behind the ViewPoint restaurant as steps to someone's house and not the path to the beach as my guidebook described. So instead, I took the really steep and trecherous path up a dirt road. No DelDOT specs here... the slope was easily 1:1 in places and I am just happy that I didnt fall down. Well I never found that beach either, but instead had a 90 minute trek up and down the hillside and in between the coconuts. Thankfully it was in the middle of the day and not the evening, when the coconuts fall. Did you know that every year 500 people die in Thailand by being hit in the head with a falling coconut? Those trees are damned dangerous. Eventually I made it back to my starting point, Ao Ban Chalok... gave up and just hung out there for an hour or so. Then I headed back to my guesthouse to relax and watch the Matrix 2. Tbag, it makes more sense the second time! And you can almost understand the Architect if you put the subtitles on.

Wednesday, I took the final exam... it was easy, I didnt even study! Then in the afternoon I went out with my new group for our first open water dives. We went to a site called "Twins", which by Thai logic is 3 peaks, and another site called Sairee Reef. The visibility was less than excellent, but still ok. And the dive was really awesome. Time moves differently, you move differently. There were corals and some stunning fish. There's a completely different world underwater, that you really havent even considered. Luke showed us Sebastian, a brilliant little fish who does tricks. ;) We gave him a great round of applause. Bravo! I found Nemo, Davy Jones' locker is messier than my room, and generally I like scuba diving a hell of a lot better than I did at the beginning of the course.

Finally today, we got up early in the morning (740am) to go out on our 2 final dives. Its been stormy the last 2 days, so again the visibility was kinda shoddy, but it was still a lot of fun. We learned the "James Bond" entry, which involves somersaulting in off the boat... or just falling off. We saw (and I kind of saw) a sting ray, I petted a silk anemone, saw a sea urchin, saw a big grouper fish, held a type of starfish, saw some sea cucumbers and a school of mackeral... and again more coral and shiny fishies and other scuba divers. :) The best part is that I think I managed to look cool the whole time, but I guess we will find out when we see the video later. Basically, now I really like Scuba diving and am about 95% likely to head back to the Buddha View and sign up for the advanced course. I guess this means I will have to stay on Koh Tao longer. How awful...