Scuba dooba

Last night I went scuba diving! It was a 'try-dive' in a specialist pool which had a shallow end of about a metre deep and then a deep end which was 3 metres deep. I had a great time and enjoyed it loads. I am going to Lanzarote over Christmas with a friend who wants to go scuba diving while we're there. We decided that we would try it out in a pool first to see if we could do it and whether we would enjoy it.

The session lasted an hour and a half and we were shown how to do a couple of things that we may need to do on a longer dive. We had to learn how to take our mouth pieces out while underwater and put them back in again as well as filling our googles with water and emptying them again underwater. I found the mouth piece part surprisingly easy and relatively comfortable. I can't say the same about filling and emptying my googles though! I think just the thought of having to fill my googles with water scared me and then I couldn't get it out again. You had to just breath out of your nose to do it but I can't seem to do that with my mouth open, which it technically is as it's round a mouth piece! I managed to do it once but it was more of a fluke than anything as I certainly couldn't do it again when I tried!

Once we had spent some time doing this we were then able to go down to the deep end. We had to gradually go down using a slope from the shallow end to the deep. It was quite uncomfortable on my ears. I kept swallowing and clearing them by holding my nose and blowing but they did still hurt a little bit. Once I was down on the bottom though I just had to remember to keep clearing them and it was fine! The feeling of weightlessness was awesome. To just sweep along the bottom and lying horizontally was brilliant.

I'm now excited about going diving in lanzarote. It will be great to dive in the sea and get to see some sealife! I am a bit anxious about whether my ears will cope in even deeper water but I will just have to give it a try and keep remembering to acclimatise my ears by swallowing or holding my nose. If I get on with it in Lanzarote I may even put on this list of things to do the open water diving course for some point in the future!