Last weekend I became an "Advanced Open Water Diver" and haven't done a damned thing since.

Last Saturday I began the AOW course w/ 2 early morning dives. PADI assumes that now you have basic SCUBA skills and you arent going to drown yourself, so in the advanced course you can do some more exciting things. So, buddy checks completed we jumped in and went down, down, down. Not quite 20,000 leagues, but 28m! That's 92 feet beneath the surface. I have to do all these conversions in my head, b/c the rest of the world uses metric, centigrade... and they even write the date wrong. 9/8/03 is August 9th, and NOT September 8th like it ought to be. Fortunately I was a thrower and can easily convert back and forth.

The point of going down that deep is (besides the obvious that many dive sites are about 30m deep) that its important to be supervised on your first trip to the deep to gauge your susceptibility to nitrogen narcosis. At depth you are breathing compressed (ie concentrated) nitrogen. Then it starts to act more like laughing gas than the inert gas that you typically breath. This results in a drugged state that the instructors seem to liken to being "drunk underwater". Its not particularly harmful by itself and there aren't any hangovers, but you can end up doing stupid things like taking your regulator out b/c you think the fish need the air more than you do. To gauge our effectedness we did a math problem on the surface (which was challenging enough!...crikee! Adding w/o a calculator!??) and then we did another at 28m to see if we were slower. Most everyone is slower and lots of people get it completely wrong. I wasnt too much slower... and it wasnt even the adding... I just had to take a few seconds to figure out where my name was and which problem i was supposed to be doing. :) Torturous math completed, we tried to swim around but the visibility at that depth was pretty much zilch so we went back up to about 16m and spied on the fishies.

We surfaced, spent about an hour eating cookies and changing our tanks to let some of the nitrogen out of our body and then went back down to try our hands at navigation. This sounded quite daunting to me since most of you know I can hardly navigate on dry land. We had to use a compass to navigate a square and hopefully end up at the beginning again... but most importantly we're not to beat our buddies up... even if she does keep hitting me in the face... which is why you are supposed to kick w/ your fins instead of "swimming" with your arms! Miracle upon miracles! We actually did it. Granted I did try to to make a wrong turn and I couldnt actually tell that I was back to the beginning again, but... I DID IT! WOOHOO!

Sunday we finished the advance course w/ 2 more dives in the morning and 1 at night. A multilevel... which we had kind of already done and a peak performance buoyancy dive. I think the PPB dive should have been first. You readjust your weights until you are perfectly neutrally bouyant. This makes it alot easier to swim around. Once I took 1.6 Kilos off my weight belt, I wasnt so inclined to sink straight to the bottom all the time. The best part was the night dive. I expected it to be scarier, b/c well... the water is pitch black and you cant see anything. The scariest part was standing in my flippers trying to step off the side of the boat w/ falling over and cracking my head open. Thankfully I succeeded. Phew. One underwater you turn your "torch" on. Thats a flashlight for us Americans. Torch!? Torchs are sticks with fire at the end. And then you go hunting for fishes to follow around. Since you only have a flashlight its quite easy to get lost... as about 4 of the people in my group proceeded to do. But I was following my instructor so closely that it didnt matter. We went to the site Twins (I think).. so didnt really see very much. I saw a tuna fish, a blue-spotted stingray out in the open (which was really cool), a hermit crab walking along and some shrimp. MMmmm. dinner. Our preferred site was too choppy... but that's where you can usually find baracuda who come out to eat. Then you help them along by pointing your torch at the little fishies. The little fishy says "hey i'm a star!", but not for long b/c the baracuda then swoops in and eats it. I definitely need to go on another night dive.

So that was last Sunday. Today is Saturday. A whole week... and what have I done? Not bloody much. The weather was quite nice early in the week so I worked on my tan at nearby Thian "Shark" Bay.. where at dawn and dusk you can don your snorkel mask and watch the sharks come out to eat. I also went out to the main beach at Sairee, where I somehow managed to lose my glasses. I have no idea how I did that. Then I tried to develop some film, but the island doesnt even have its own film development equipment... you have to send it on a boat to somewhere else. Oh well. Tuesday I rented another motorbike to try to explore the other parts of the island outside of Chalok. But when I crashed after a meager 10 minutes, I lost a lot of my zeal. Some of the roads need a lot of help from RK@K, b/c they are really just ragged dirt paths and not suitable for a novice driver like myself. Tom, can you "get on that"? Fortunately, I only skinned my knee, ankle and elbow. The worst parts were that I tore a hole in my favorite fisherman's pants and had to pay an extra $7.50 for the small crack in the bike's basket. The best part of that whole fiasco was that I found my glasses on the beach and so rewarded myself with a pizza!

Then the weather turned cloudy and a bit rainy.... so pretty much I spent a lot of time reading and watching movies. Quite relaxing. 'School of Rock' was fun... but 'LTR 2' was torturous! Sorry Felix. After all those days of lounging around I thought I finally found the motivation to do something. Still no motivation to leave however. I took the Emergency Responder short course yesterday... basically you practice CPR on a dummy a few times and then they consider you qualified? Hmm.. anyway, that was just the precursor to my next course... Rescue Diver. I'm looking forward to it. Most peolpe say its a lot of work, but really rewarding. I am just waiting for someone else to take it with... which pretty much leaves me back at doing nothing, but emailing, eating, reading and watching movies. Dreadful really. ;