Diving with Isaiah
03 March 2009 Labels: Advanced Open Water, Alki, beginning diving, bottle hunting, Deep dive, Open Water, PADI, scuba instruction, Seattle
Isaiah is a 17 year old boy who likes to dive. Oh...he won't show it purposefully, as he needs to be cool. But...as an instructor, I can see it in his eyes.
He started with me as an Open Water student in my teen class, and for Christmas, his family pitched in an paid for his Advanced Open Water course.
This past weekend, we were going to do his Deep dive. Hit 100...find narcosis? But, at 60' deep, he was having a lot of flooding with his mask, and he was checking his air quite frequently.
I am BIG on "air underwater is important", so I expect my students to check their air. But he was acting nervous about it. I checked his gauge...still had 70% of his tank left.
We were swimming over a bottle field, so I changed our dive plan. We circled the bottles, and suddenly, I saw a purple trail of ink escape into the water in front of me.
I looked at Isaiah, as his eyes lit up and he excitedly pointed in the direction the squid had escaped to. The show had begun.
We watched the little stubby squid as he changed colours, camoflauging himself so we wouldn't see him. Eventually, he shot a perfect "ink ring" and with that he was gone.
Back on shore, Isaiah wasn't disappointed in not completing the deep dive, rather he was excited to see the squid put on a display for us.
Sometimes I think we get too caught up in the "goal" of the dive, and we miss the delights along the path. It's not about going deep, or completing some random set of skills. We need to take the moments the underwater world gives us, and allow those to change the way we see the world.
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