Super Scuba Goobers!

This is Tim's new nickname for us, since we've completed our PADI Advanced Open Water Diving course last weekend, allowing us to now dive to 30m instead of our Open Water restriction of 18m. It was another intense weekend, that included 5 dives in total out near Portsea and Rye Pier in Port Phillip Bay. We did the course with Matt and Dave (who received their Open Water license years ago and had been waiting on Tim to complete his so they could all get their advanced license together), under the wise and watchful eyes of instructor Mark Ryan and his wife, Vicki. Mark owns the dive shop with Adrian, our Open Water instructor, and while Adrian's passion is diverse aquatic life, Mark's passion for shipwrecks runs as deep as some of the dives he has done (the Australian government commissioned him to dive 105m to investigate the effects of the dredging in the bay). Another interesting fact about Mark is that he discovered one of the most pristine and in-tact shipwrecks in Victoria. Mark and Vicki's perfect balance of knowledge and experience, witty advice, and tales of diving made the weekend an extremely enjoyable and worthwhile learning experience.

We began Saturday morning with a knowledge transfer session to ensure that we had read our 5 chapters and completed the quizzes. Of course, Mark had a few tales of diving danger to throw in the mix. After I asked what happens to a deep diver who experiences complications with his rebreather and Mark responded with, 'He dies', I figured I probably shouldn't ask any more questions before any of us had even gotten in the water. We did three shore dives off Rye Pier on Saturday, one to master our buoyancy control, one to master our navigation skills with our underwater compasses, and finally a naturalist dive that showed us how to better dig around in the kelp to find hidden aquatic life. Three dives is rather exhausting, and most of us were out cold by 9:30pm that night.

Sunday brought with it the excitement of the 2 deep boat dives ahead of us. One shipwreck at 24m, and a deep dive at 27m. I was a bit nervous, and tightly grasped Tim's hand during the entire descent to the shipwreck, but once we were down, it was just like being at 18m (only a bit darker, allowing me the chance to use my new underwater flashlight!). We saw a very cool Wobbigong shark (although it might have been a Port Jackson shark), but don't worry Mom it was not more than 2 feet in length. Here is a video of someone diving this shipwreck:



We descended for the second 'deep' dive, and Mark had us each perform a Nitrogen Narcosis test. Basically, when you are diving at deeper depths, your body's balance of nitrogen vs. oxygen gets thrown out of whack a bit, and you can experience being 'narced', which isn't harmful but can result in slower thinking and reaction times. Our narc test required us to solve the following math problem once we had descended the full 27m:

3 * our age + 32.

It took me a few seconds to remember my age, and once I had performed the long division on Mark's underwater writing pad, I got the answer. Afterwards, Mark said I was the only one to actually do long division on his tablet. :)

So, we passed our course, and we are officially certified as Advanced divers. Sounds fancy eh :) I'm definitely looking forward to more diving!