The first dive of a dive trip is always a nervous goofy messed up affair. Today is no different.
Hermit Crab strolling past the pool this morning.
We are packing the truck trying to get to the dive shop for around 9:00 to do our sign up, get tanks and do our check out dive. Oh! We forgot snacks and liquids. I run back into our unit. Oh! Mur doesn’t want to take his sunglasses and I forgot mine. We run back into our unit. OK, we think we have everything, right?
Our trip to the dive shop was easy. No video, no check out dive, just hand in papers, get our tanks and we are off. We decide to go to a dive site called “The Lake”. We miss the turnoff and have to double back. We get there and park and check out how we are going to enter the water. Looks pretty good, just some small rocks to walk over and around.
We set up our tanks, BCDs, regs and weights first. They go together pretty good this first time. Oops! Mur put his together with his tank backwards. It fits much nicer the other way. We fix that real quick.
Next are the wetsuits and booties. The suits are dry and mine is a touch hard to pull up. Hope no one is watching! Dive computers, cameras, masks. I spray the masks with our home made mask defogger of baby shampoo and water. Only thing is I didn’t make it strong enough and didn’t spray enough in, so it dries out fast and we are both fogged up by the time we get to the bouy. I will fix that tonight.
We don all our gear and trundle down to the water. We are standing in the water when I realize we haven’t turned on our air yet. Big OOPSIE! Get that turned on, double check everything else and off we go.
We have a pretty scenic dive for the first one. We see many old fish friends and even some new ones. Our rocky start to the day turns into the beginnings of a great day of diving.
Bait Ball
PS Our subsequent gearing up for dives goes much much better than the first time. In fact, we get our process down pretty da** good.