Floating on the water is where we want to be

When you own a home there are regular chores.  Mow the yard, change the air conditioning filter, wash the windows, etc.  Same thing when you live on a boat, but wetter.  When you live on a boat the chore of mowing the lawn morphs into scraping the barnacles and algae off the hull.  And it's best done monthly.  Less frequently than mowing, and a lot wetter.

I take care of mowing the lawn now, so it just made sense that I would flip that upside down and take care of scraping the hull; when we got one.

Scraping the hull requires full immersion into the water.  That requires a whole new way of breathing.  Scuba gear is required.  To get scuba tanks filled, you need to be Scuba Certified.  No problem!

We both passed the online scuba course.  The online course outlines five gazillion things that can go wrong and teaches the skills you need to safely get out of the water alive.  

Sitting in front of a computer, taking the online class, it seemed pretty easy.  Every lesson included beautiful video of divers calmly doing everything right.  Relaxing music and muted bubbles played behind the announcer's engaging Austrailian accent.  

At the end of each lesson, the beautiful, young divers are shown smiling and joking on deck; not a care in the world.  They made it look so easy!  

We were promised that our first breath underwater would be unforgettable.  And mine was!  

Unlike the online videos, the sound of the bubbles is not muted and relaxing.  It's deafeningly loud and super scary.  Suddenly the same primal instincts that helped me fail the Red Cross swimming course about 50 years ago came rushing back.  

Back when I was eight years old (and again when I was nine) while attempting to learn how to swim, they told me to blow the air out of my lungs when my face was under water.  Under water!  Expel the air in your lungs while you're under water!  That's nuts!  Even at that young age, I knew this was just not smart!  I wouldn't comply. I didn't get a certificate (twice).

Then there was the time when I was about 10 years old, jumping in the wild surf of the Atlantic Ocean.  I was knocked down by a fierce wave (probably a 2 footer!).  Water filled my mouth and the glug-glug sound of drowning filled my ears as I felt Posiden pull me deeper into his watery realm, my belly dragged along the gritty sand, my outstretched arms grabbed for something - anything to stop this 60 mile an hour journey to my death!  

Finally!  I grabbed onto something solid and very soon I felt the sun on my back and heard the sea gulls overhead.  I also heard a man's voice, "Are you OK, sweetie?"  

I opened my eyes and looked at the hairy ankle of a total stranger.  How embarrassing!  Fighting a strong desire to get up and hide, I let him help me up and I ran the ten feet to our family's blanket on the beach.

In the Dive Shop's dive training pool all these harrowing experiences and more kicked in, commanding my nose and lungs to disregard the instructions I learned online.    

Scuba training video: "Breathe slowly and don't hold your breath."

In the scary water, my reptilian brain ignites a primal panic that causes my breathing rate to increase generating increasingly shallow breaths that are exhaled through my nose causing my mask to flood.  

Scuba training video: "Calm down.  Breath slowly."  

Whoosh, I stand up.  I can't.  I simply can't talk myself into it!  

With my head out of the water, I gaze longingly at all the friendly air I can enjoy any way I please - through my mouth, my nose, or both simultaneously.  And I don't even have to think about it!

Just like the nice hairy-legged gentleman from my childhood, the instructor pops his head out of the water and asks if I'm all right.  He assures me that I can take my time, and he'll even let me swallow all the water in the pool if I have to.  He tells me there's no need to keep up with the rest of the class.  I nod and give him the OK sign. (you have to learn a lot of hand signals because you can't talk underwater.  So I thought I would at least demonstrate proficiency in that skill.  I didn't want him to think I was a total idiot!)

I've got hundreds of dollars invested in this.  And we need to be able to dive to live on a boat!  Right!?  So now the thrifty side of me kicks in.  I know I'm not gonna get a refund.  I gather myself and go down again where the instructor is demonstrating how to recover your regulator, should it happen to come out of your mouth.  And this is important because a regulator delivers air to your mouth from the tank strapped on your back.

Dropping the regulator must happen a lot because it's the first skill you have to demonstrate proficiency in!  Whenever your regulator is out of your mouth you have to blow tiny bubbles out of your lips so your lungs don't explode!  (this is especially important when you're below 10 feet, so they make you practice it until it's second nature). 

Blow bubbles under water?  Are you nuts?  I need that air.  Even the Red Cross couldn't teach me to do that!  My reptilian brain brings on primal panic again!  Up I sputter.  

Once again, the instructor joins me above the water and assures me I can stay in the shallow end and practice this skill before I move on to the next skill.  (Which is getting water out of a flooded mask by blowing air out of my nose under water.  The same nose I'm not supposed to exhale from when there's no water in my mask.) 

For the next two hours, Jerry and the other four people in the class are demonstrating all kinds of skills like how to share air, what if feels like to have a completely empty tank of air while you're ten feet under, how to play with the buoyancy of the dive equipment, how to swim from 30 feet down with no air and get to the top without having your lungs explode.  Important stuff.  

I still can't get my body to override what I've been doing for more than 58 years - breathing!  I decide I'm just not cut out for it.  I decide to walk away from the money and promised adventure back onto dry land.  

Meanwhile, Jerry passes all the skill tests and decides he will move on to the next day's planned open water dive in a Florida spring far, far away.  How far, far away?  Wake up at 4 AM and be at the Dive Shop by 5:15 AM far, far away.  I stay home.

By lunch time, he's texting me with the news that he can't get his ears to equalize - he's been trying all morning.  And this is an important skill because if you can't get the pressure in your ears to equalize then you can lose your hearing.  

We sleep on it and decide maybe we'll go ahead and skip the whole diving thing.  We celebrate the fact that at least we tried and bonus: we now own some great snorkeling equipment.  

So slight change in plans.  Instead of scraping the bottom of the boat ourselves, we'll go ahead and hire someone to do it for us.   Sort of like hiring a lawn care company.  

For a point of reference: the money we spent on the aborted scuba courses would have paid for quite a bit of bottom scraping.  

Good news though - we still have our hearing, intact lungs and lives!  The adventure continues.