There are few things in life that we keep in our bucket list and few things that we have not thought about in our wildest dreams, scuba diving was part of that list. When I first heard that our group would be diving, my reaction was I will stay away from this one. But there were two positive things – first presence of Scott, who is an expert on scuba diving and has done it countless times, have instructed and taken many people for scuba dive for years and has dived to a depth of 200 feet. With his roaring confidence, expert skills and assurance that you don’t even have to know swimming to dive helped me decide. I obviously used twitter for suggestions and many people reassured me of the fun adventure it would be. Second thing that helped me was that I was not the only one with zero experience. That factor helps you decide that learning something new would be fun. And being in Key Largo, the diving capital of world and not to dive would be sort of blasphemy.

We were a group of eight people – one expert diver, two people with diving experience and  four of us with first try. We did our first practice in a pool, but parameters of equation had changed completely as we had thought of. It was getting dark so we had  less pool time, unusual to Florida weather it was extremely cold, and seeing all the gear with different gauges to monitor and learn everything in short time seemed impossible. I had been bugging Drew with a zillion question, he has taken the diving course and was ready with all the answers. Scott and him had been giving me very good answers, but when it comes to practical I trust experts only. Even though theoretically things work, in practice things are different. But there was no harm to jump in the pool, so we had out wet suits on, air cylinder on the back, fins and mask ready and we jumped into water. We tried different things underwater for around 40 minutes ranging from how to communicate, breath, hold the mask,  remove water from mask, control ear pressure etc. We also practiced different situations such as when one loses his breathing tube, how to get other one, how to ask for help. Balancing was big problem and that was resolved by adding weights. We also tried how to go up and down in water by controlling our breathing and I failed miserably in that. Since we did not have time, we wrapped up.

I was not confident and Brett has the similar concerns. Scott once again gave us confidence and scheduled another practice session next morning. Then we were hit with the bad news, next day was going to be coldest in Florida history and none of the boats would be going in water. Scott had a contingency plan for that too, he prepared us to wear two wet suits, so we would be warm. But that adds to another problem, wet suits gives you more buoyancy so we need to carry more weight. Scott also arranged for a boat to go in waters next day.

Next day practice session was good. We had two wet suits on, more weights and it was freezing cold but we were determined. Spending extra time underwater in pool gave me much more confidence and I was ready to jump in water. We practiced how to get on to boat, jump from the boat and other necessary tricks. We were set to jump in Atlantic. I bought an underwater camera so I can shoot something, though the chances were low considering most of the time I would be trying to make things work, but I wanted to capture the amazing experience we were about to encounter.

It was a 45 seat boat, carrying only 8-9 people to dive. Once it was in sea I realized the crazy thing we were about to do. The day before I was making comments about how I have never see a sea calmer then this, but things had changed. It was choppy, 3 feet high waves, dense fog and extreme cold. With these kind of situations I would not even go on a boat but I don’t know what force has been driving me. We reached our dive point, our captain briefed us, Scott gave us last set of instructions (video below) and we were ready (or not?). The plan was Drew and other divers will get into water first, Scott will go next, Wes and Stacy will jump in after that and Brett and I were about to jump last. Scott would take 2 people at a time to bottom and then we will move around and see corals for some time. Things went on fine for few few minutes, I had not jumped into water yet, and Stacy did not like the water. So she came back in the boat, I had no idea why but that scared me. Then boat’s anchor slipped and people were trying to fix it and I had no clue what was going on. I was not sure what I was about to do, rocking boat has already made me sea sick and all this was adding to confusion.

Finally, I jumped in water, hold it to my line and reached next to Scott. Then I started my descent following all the instructions I knew. With the complete precision I started moving downwards. But as I mentioned things change in real life, my ear pressure was changing rapidly, so I used the technique I had learned. But next thing that went wrong was water inside mask. I tried to remove it and was partially successful. So I went deeper and almost reached the bottom, I waved at my fellow divers, stayed for around a minute, tried to look around but could not see much, no underwater life at all. But I had water in my mask again, I tried the technique and failed. My mask had a lot of water in it, so I came back on surface. I repeated the same trick again of going back in and came back after some time. I had tasted salt water and that was end of my dive. Getting back into the boat was another bit of adventure, I had panicked a bit and I could not hear what the guy on boat was saying, cold was adding up to all the confusion. Finally, I was on boat, safe and sound. I did not consider it as dive because I did not get to see the fish but other said, since I was breathing underwater for sometime, I made the dive.

Overall, it was a great experience. Given other day and time, when things are better and I get a chance to see the beautiful underwater life, I would jump again. But this first try could not have been possible without Scott and his confidence. He gave me the confidence, proper training and facilitated the jump. I would not jump into Atlantic on such a crazy day without being in such expert hands. Thanks Scott for such a wonderful experience.

Another person’s experience from same team.