Someone here requested a full report of my trip to Roatan and PADI
open water certification course, so here goes.

I made advance arrangements to stay at Chillies and to dive with
Native Sons. When I first arrived at Native Sons, there was a big
group of people there returning from a dive with their wet suits and
gear all in tow, some of them looking like they’d been scuba diving
since they were in diapers. And here I am, a newbie, showing up on
their doorstep never having even touched diving equipment before. That
was a little intimidating; I felt a bit like Johnny Utah in the movie
“Point Break,” inexperienced at surfing and really, really bad at it,
awkwardly trying to get in good with all those surfer dudes. But we
all have to start somewhere, ya?

Mark was my instructor. He’s a really cool guy, not terribly detail-
oriented with the classroom and administrative stuff, but great once
you get out into the water. My plan was to try the one-day DSD course,
and then if all went well with that, to complete the open water
certification course. I did the DSD with six other people, two of whom
planned to complete the open water course, with the other four
stopping after the DSD. Andrea accompanied us on our first dive, and
also took us out on our fourth and final dive. She’s also really cool;
better at the nuts and bolts administrative stuff than Mark, and also
really good in the water.

Our first confined open water practice wasn’t a whole lot of fun, but
once we got down into the water on our first open water dive, I
thought to myself, “Yeah, OK, I can see why so many people are into
this.” Three days later, my two classmates were raving about the three
sea turtles they’d seen on our first dive. Somehow I missed them,
dammit. What I remember most about the first dive was Mark
complimenting me later for establishing good buoyancy control. (I was
weighted down pretty heavily on all four dives, 17 lbs.; they tell me
I should aim for 14 or 15 in future dives.) Of course, I was most
happy about the fact that at the end of the dive, my lungs hadn’t
exploded and my ears didn’t hurt.

Probably the scariest moment for me during the entire course came in
our second confined water practice, when I had to practice taking off
my mask. The moment I removed it, I inadvertently let my jaws slacken
up a bit and my regulator popped out of my mouth. Because we were
sitting in shallow water, I was obviously never in any real danger,
but still, flailing about for a second or two effectively blind with
no air to breath is not a pleasant feeling. Fortunately I recovered my
regulator quickly—it was hovering only a few inches in front of my face
—put on my mask, blew out the water, and got a compliment from Mark
for keeping a cool head.

All four dives we went on (Lighthouse, Fish Den, Blue Channel, and
Turtle Crossing) were pretty spectacular, with great visibility.
Obviously, we saw a plethora of beautiful fish and coral. We didn’t
see any sharks, which was just fine with me; I’m perfectly content to
view those suckers through plates of reinforced glass at an aquarium.
However, we did come across a small predator fish (no more than 18
inches long), maybe a barracuda, just hovering in the water about 20
feet above the ocean floor from where we were. (Somehow it slipped my
mind to ask Mark what exactly it was; anybody here have his e-mail
address?) That particular fish showed absolutely no interest in us, as
is usually the case with predator fish and human beings, but that was
still a little creepy. We also saw a couple of eels, one a big old
moray fast asleep on the ocean floor with just his tail sticking out
from underneath the coral, and another little one who poked his head
up out of his coral den for one brief second and opened his jaws, then
went back inside. The best, though, was the large sea turtle we saw on
our fourth and final dive. All the better for me, since I’d missed the
three on our first dive.

The classroom stuff went well too. The most difficult part was
figuring out the tables on the Recreational Dive Planner. The whole
time I was doing the problems in the booklet, I’m thinking to myself,
“You know, I think maybe I’m never, ever going to do more than one
dive in a 24-hour period, ever.”

Other than a few pin-prick stings, I suffered no injuries out in the
water. My one minor mishap occurred at Native Sons after returning
from my third dive. I was sloshing fresh water around the inside of my
BCD, shaking it side to side, and the inflater hose swung up and
dinged me on the cheekbone, giving me a nice little shiner below my
right eye. Fortunately it didn’t affect me at all on our last dive,
and it doesn’t hurt much now, but it sure looks unsightly, and has
inspired a whole lot of comments and questions from people in my
community here in El Salvador (I’m a Peace Corps Volunteer) over the
past couple days. But it’s all good; my reputation in this town could
use some spicing up anyway.

I ended up staying one day longer than I’d planned so I could do a
night dive the day after getting my certification. But I ended up
backing out in the end, because I got liquored up pretty good at the
end of the fourth day and felt pretty hung over and crappy for most of
the following day. Also, though Mark and Andrea made night diving
sound fabulous, it didn’t sound so appealing from the chapter I read
in the advanced manual. You may as well be swimming around in a vat of
black ink, you can’t see sh.t without a light, and the potential for
vertigo and other mishaps is just enormous. You know, I enjoyed my
initiation to the world of diving and will certainly repeat the
experience in the future, but I think I might be able to go the rest
of my life quite happily without ever doing a night dive.

Overall, I’d rate the complete experience as a 9.8 on a scale of 1 to
10 (9.9 if I’d seen the three turtles on our first dive, and 10.0 if
I’d seen the turtles AND hadn’t brained myself with the inflater
hose). I’m still a little amazed that I started out as a complete
novice, and then only four days later, here I am, a certified open
water diver. I was afraid the physical aspects of diving would be like
surfing or skiing, two sports at which I’ve failed miserably—arduous,
technically difficult, and beyond my capabilities. Thankfully, this
turned out to be not the case at all. I think anybody who enjoys good
health, is a decent swimmer, and who loves the ocean can dive, and I
turned out to be no exception.

Many thanks to everyone here who encouraged me to go through with this
crazy diving adventure. Don’t know if I’d have had the guts to do so
otherwise. I think we can put to rest the question of whether the Bay
Islands are a good place for a novice like me to learn the sport. I
can’t imagine a better environment to get certified quickly and have
some serious fun in the process.