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Went diving with Liz (Claudio's colleage in the Agua Rica diving shop), and Dave (a canadian dude who works in management of an aircraft electronics company). This time the descend works well and I practice some skills (mask clearance and regulator recovery) with no problems. The first dive is already cool. It's beautiful to swim through swarms of fishes. We see some purple moray eels and a majestic manta ray drifting over us. I though this had to be highlight for today, but keep reading...
Coming back to the boat for a surface break I'm over-excited and eat way too much. I really shouldn't eat pina (ananas) during these breaks, because the shaking of the waiting boat makes me slightly seasick and the pina acid increases this effect. So I decide to throw up (Immer schön nach Lee). I think about whether I should do a second dive, but Liz encourages me, and fortunately I do it. Indeed it's much better in the water.
The second dive is an extreme experience for me - heaven and hell. The water is unbelievable cold - or maybe I just feel it more because I'm weakened. It's 18C below the thermocline and my wetsuit is crap. Most of the time I spend freezing and hoping to finish - not quite a situation in which you wanna continue diving without an instructor. But then the view is really worth everything. We see more beautiful fish schools, lots of purple moray eels two of them huge (1-2 m), one of which we even see complete before it notices us, and hides in its cave. More manta rays pass by, this time even close. One of the highlights is a huge stingray (about 1 m body diameter and 3 m long with the tail), that swims below us for a while. But what totally blew my mind was when the sea turtle showed up. It had easily the mass of an adult, maybe more, and swam next to us. It accepted us to join for 1-2 minutes, before heading off to the depths of the pacific. AMAZING!
After the return ride, a good lunch and a nap I recover from freezing and weakness and have 1 hour left to learn for the diving test. This doesn't give me enough time to learn how to use the dive table, so I ask Claudio to explain it to me. Most of the test can be solved with common sense, but when it comes to using the dive table, I get Claudio thinking. As a result of my ignorance, I've used it in a different way that altogether avoids using table 3 out of 3. We have an argument, because Claudio has been teaching for 20 years and argues I'm using it the wrong way, but I'm convinced that table 3 is redundant and it's easier to just work with tables 1+2 to compute the same result. So he suggest I got the right result coincidentially, and comes up with additional examples. However they work as well. So I suppose writing PNAS papers was good for something - you recognize the stuff that is essential and the stuff that should really go to the supplementary material :-)
Dive test passes. Yay, got a new Skill : Open-water scuba diver !!!
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