Sleeping with the fishes

Thanks to Eddie on the dive with us for this video

It looks like you're watching an episode of Blue Planet. It feels like you're in another world. It sounds like you're Darth Vader. It's Scuba diving! And it is amazing.

Exploring the reef

We spent a fantastic week diving in the Bay Islands on the northern coast of Honduras - Chris is already an advanced Padi diver but I was taking the first steps, a Padi open water diver course. Our island, Utila, is beautiful and also supposedly one of the cheapest places in the world to learn to dive so, ever the bargain hunters, we hot-footed it to the wonderful dive shop / hostel / bar / restaurant / beach volleyball court that is Underwater Vision.

One of the brilliant things about the place - and there were lots - was that there was a real sense of community that, nomatter how good the atmosphere, is actually really rare in hostels. I think it comes down to the fact the one activity there was diving, and each time you'd go out on the boat you'd be with maybe ten or 15 other people, all having fun together. So everybody knows everybody else, at least a little bit, and hangs out together. It was a very nice place to spend a week and we made some great friends (shout out to Timon and Kristin!).

The diving was ... virtually indescribable for me. I feel like an entirely new side of my life has opened up, and now when we're making travel plans all I can think about is dive opportunities. Two thirds of the planet is water and, now, parts of that are accessible to me! It is a marvellous, exciting feeling.

Breathing underwater

I remember the first time I went down so clearly, it was overwhelming in every sense. Firstly, you're breathing underwater - wtf. Then there's stimulation from every direction: the noise from your regulator (the breathing apparatus in your mouth) is deafeningly loud in your head; all you can see is the bubbles streaming from it; and those same bubbles are vibrating your mask on your face. Add to that difficulty equalising the pressure in your ears as it increases while you descend, and it's fairly amazing more people don't have panic attacks!

There is lots of stuff to remember for diving (the most obvious and suprisingly difficult to follow instruction being "don't stop breathing"), but I had a fantastic teacher in Jo (Frenchy) at Underwater Vision and once you get the hang of it it is far more simple than you'd expect. Pretty much everybody picks it up very quickly. 

I don't want to use the phrase "like a duck to water" (okay, maybe I do a little bit), but it blows my mind how quickly the human body adapts to the situation. I had quite a lot of trouble and pain equalising my ears while descending to start with: on my third open water dive, it took me a whole ten minutes to get down to 18m. This is a long time! By my sixth dive I was practically first to the bottom, and having to think less and less about equalising - my body started doing it for me. And on that sixth dive, more than once I actually frightened myself when I 'suddenly' heard the sound from the regulator in my mouth and wondered what the hell that loud noise was - my brain had just completely tuned out from it. When you think about just how alien this underwater world is to us oxygen-dependent land creatures, this is remarkable.

Spinning

As for the underwater world itself ... well, it's a bit like being inside an aquarium tank. In fact, because the mask frames your vision, sometimes - especially when you're looking at something particularly spectacular - it feels like you're watching TV. Except everything there is wild, all the fish are there living their lives in their natural environment, and any time they like they can just swim off into the immense deep blue surrounding you. Oh yes, and you're swimming around with them, although it feels more like flying than swimming. If you want to look at something swimming past you in the opposite direction, you don't have to back up or stop and turn around ... you can just flip upside down and watch as it glides underneath you and off into the distance. So yeah it is a bit like being inside an aquarium, but it is infinitely, exponentially, logarithmically better.

And once you get used to the noise, it's not really like you're Darth Vader at all. But it is definitely, definitely, okay to pretend you are the Little Mermaid.

SARAH