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I decided to go for an exploration scuba dive with Claudio, who owns the Agua Rica, a diving shop near Wayra. We start on Friday 18/01, when I first watch a introductory video and then go to a hotel pool with Claudio where we practice the most important techniques - clearing a water-filled mask and recovering a lost regulator (the regulator is the thing you breath with). Next we practice "neutral buoyance" (that means swimming weighless, i.e. neither sinking nor floating, which is achieved by pumping just the right amount of tank air into your vest and thus balancing your displaced water volume). Difficult, when the pool is only 1 m deep. Then I practice paddeling with the fins. This is the most difficult part for me, because I've never used fins before.
Saturday 8 am we meet on the beach to set off for the real diving adventure. I meet Lorraine, a very nice canadian lady, Michel, a french dude, and another canadian and an american. Besides the american guy everyone has dive experience, and they're all like: "what you have only done a pool session and now you go out to the open ocean and just hope for the best???". They kinda make me nervous, but Claudio is as always: "don't worry. No problem". We take a small boat to Claudio's dive boat and set off to the Catalinas, a small rock island archipel, 45 min from Playa Tamarindo and close to Playa Flamingo.
I expect to start diving in shallow water, but not with Claudio. He drops the descend line to about 20 m, and tells me to simply go down. Now I am really nervous. Go down? Really. But I've just been like 1 m deep in the pool. Yeah, yeah, it's fine, just go down. Ok, no way back, so I start descending on the line. I really have difficulties equilibrating the pressure in my sinuses, so my ears start to hurt. After a while I notice that it helps to keep breathing steadily, so I try to do that, and finally reach the ground. It's really an experience. Everything is so different under water. The sight is poor - lots of Plankton.
We see a couple of nice fishes, but then suddenly I see a big shadow next to us - a shark! A white tip shark. Not dangerous, not big (1-2 m), but impressive. It's scared of us and swims away. WOW! First dive, first shark, how cool! We keep searching and find some more little sharks hiding from us in the rocks. After about 30 min my air is used up (because I don't use it effectively yet, normally 45 mins should be possible), so I return to the surface with Claudio.
I get back to the boat and I'm excited but also totally tired. Eating lots of sweet cookies and drinking ice tea help me to recover. On the second dive we see a puffer fish and some sea stars, but not much else. But on our way back on the boat something totally unexpected happens: We see a whale! A hunchback whale just passes by the boat, shows up two times and dives away. I even got a quick photo of the second time, but unfortunately I forgot to turn the video on, and the photo has poor quality. But anyway, what an experience!
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