Are We Learning Yet?

In case you are wondering, no this photo wasn't taken in Maui! Want to know something really funny? That's probably some of the best visibility we've dove in so far! This came from my third dive in Gull Lake, but I'll get to that in a minute.

I missed telling about my previous Wednesday night dive, there's a reason for that, it wasn't the greatest. It was a themed night, the object was finding a sunken treasure chest full of prizes. Becca and I both decided there was no point for the two of use even attempting to search for it, we are lucky to find the water when we have all of our gear on, let alone a box in the water. We did not find the treasure, but we were in the area and it was a pure accident, that should count for something.

Two dives in, everything is a learning experience. The lesson on this night, look at your compass before you enter the water! What I thought would be an easy straight out, then 90 degree turn to follow the shore turned into a goat rodeo at about 20 feet under. All it took was a small stop, then all sense of direction was lost and it became a shrug our shoulders and pick a direction. It was a rather embarrassing dive in terms of trying to accomplish something. Next time, read the compass, check.

For some reason we had quite a bit of air left in our tanks after our Wednesday night dive, so we decided on Sunday to burn through the rest of our air in Gull Lake. With our lesson learned, we set our compass heading before entering the water this time. We headed out, reached our turnaround point without seeing anything interesting, then decided to head back. It was at this point where we found the motorcycle and the phone booth. Woo Who! I was hoping we would find something, too bad Murphey's Law stepped in when we were already low on air. It was fun to say we found something again, even though we couldn't play around for long. I know Becca wanted to ride it!

Since we were low on air, we did a surface swim to shore. The lesson learned from this dive, when doing our 3 minute safety stop at 15 feet don't hover, continue swimming to shore! Can't wait to see what our next lesson is, our next series of dives will be in a quarry for our advanced class this weekend. I'm super excited about them! I know our underwater navigation could use some work, but I also feel that with our trials and mistakes we swam away with some great experience already. I'm predicting great things for us and I expect to be labeled "Rock Stars" from our instructor ;)