Long story short, a Korean military hoss in Yangsan loves to SCUBA and loves sharing his hobby. This guy is in charge of information control, is a 7th degree black belt, expert knife fighter, trained to kill using pressure points, and is a paratrooper. He even trained the first Korean astronaut. I've been one to say that I would never consider most Korean things and people to be 'badass'... but he most certainly IS.
Two weekends ago I had 2 dives in the pool with Kelly to practice basic techniques. Last weekend we had 4 ocean dives to complete our training. Here is the account of that last weekend.
Beautiful cove, but unfortunately not where we got to dive...
Again - it was a beautiful water along the beach... but it was only in a very small area!Saturday morning, Patrick, Kelly, and I met Young Min at 9:30AM to start our journey. We didn't get to our dive site until the afternoon, so we only had time for one dive. It just so happens that the ocean was particularly rough, and Patrick told us that he thought that if Kelly and I didn't need 4 dives to complete our training we probably wouldn't have gone out in those conditions. Why on EARTH you WOULDN'T go out with trained divers, but you WOULD with people who have never been diving before is beyond me.... but so it went.
That first dive was absolutely... interesting. We suited up in a boat that was rocking like crazy and launched backwards into the water. Because the sea was so rough everybody scattered, and Young Min and I had to swim for 15 minutes on the surface to meet up with Kelly and Patrick who were already at the diving buoy. We finally gathered, and went down for our dive.
I didn't realize it at the time, but my mask was incredibly too tight for my face. As we descended, the water pressure compressed the air inside my mask - and I didn't relieve that vacuum fast enough. Three times during the dive I had to literally pry the mask off of my face to rid myself of the intense pressure of the mask being sucked HARDCORE to my face.
Once we were down on the bottom, we gathered, took roll - and found that we were 1 person short. We had no idea where she was, so her partner went to look for her.
In all the commotion, I was sucking air like crazy. Combined with our 15 minute swim on the surface, I was only able to stay under water for about 5 minutes before it was time for us to go back up. And if one person has to go up, everybody has to go up.
By this time we still hadn't found our other diver, so Young Min left Kelly and I with Patrick, and took off to (evidently) go help look for the other diver. The there of us started to ascend to make our safety stop at 6 meters. But we had trouble with our buoyancy and sunk back down to about 12 meters again, and had to make our way BACK up to our safety zone. Currents, going up and down like a yo-yo, poor visibility, and no dive leader. Awesome.
Somewhere in the middle of this Young Min returned, and we finally got back to the surface. In the boat was our missing diver, sprawled out and basking in the sun as if nothing had happened. It was a ridiculous dive, and I hope that I never have one like it again. Below is the aftermath:
That first dive was absolutely... interesting. We suited up in a boat that was rocking like crazy and launched backwards into the water. Because the sea was so rough everybody scattered, and Young Min and I had to swim for 15 minutes on the surface to meet up with Kelly and Patrick who were already at the diving buoy. We finally gathered, and went down for our dive.
I didn't realize it at the time, but my mask was incredibly too tight for my face. As we descended, the water pressure compressed the air inside my mask - and I didn't relieve that vacuum fast enough. Three times during the dive I had to literally pry the mask off of my face to rid myself of the intense pressure of the mask being sucked HARDCORE to my face.
Once we were down on the bottom, we gathered, took roll - and found that we were 1 person short. We had no idea where she was, so her partner went to look for her.
In all the commotion, I was sucking air like crazy. Combined with our 15 minute swim on the surface, I was only able to stay under water for about 5 minutes before it was time for us to go back up. And if one person has to go up, everybody has to go up.
By this time we still hadn't found our other diver, so Young Min left Kelly and I with Patrick, and took off to (evidently) go help look for the other diver. The there of us started to ascend to make our safety stop at 6 meters. But we had trouble with our buoyancy and sunk back down to about 12 meters again, and had to make our way BACK up to our safety zone. Currents, going up and down like a yo-yo, poor visibility, and no dive leader. Awesome.
Somewhere in the middle of this Young Min returned, and we finally got back to the surface. In the boat was our missing diver, sprawled out and basking in the sun as if nothing had happened. It was a ridiculous dive, and I hope that I never have one like it again. Below is the aftermath:
Semi-black eyes
Bloodshot and disgusting.Other than that the weekend was pretty good. I was told that if you can dive off the coast of Korea, you can dive anywhere. The stronger currents and lower visibility make for more challenging conditions. I didn't feel comfortable until the fourth and last dive, so I'm hoping that most of my future dives will continue with that trend! It was great to just hang out with other divers in the evening, eat delicious food outside together, and just enjoy each other's company. Had the actual diving gone better, it would have been the kind of extremely relaxing weekend that people look forward to to 'get away' for a while.
This next weekend is Chusok, the Korean version of Thanksgiving - so that translates to a 4-day weekend for us teachers (: I don't have any plans, so who knows what I'll end up doing. But I'll be sure to update you if anything awesome comes about!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment