Advanced Open Water. Check.

I finished my first course today! The dive shop will send in my paperwork, and I will get a certification card mailed to my home in the States.

The first dive was a Fish ID dive. I had a slate and pencil and listed the fish and creatures I saw and their approximate numbers. By the time I was finished I had over twenty listed; and I'm sure there were numerous species I missed! That was a fun dive on a pretty, pristine reef here, called San Juan.

Dive two was on a reef that really doesn't have a name, but does have, in addition to a reef with oodles of critters, a large, flat, area where I could do my navigation skills.

The Navigation Dive took quite a bit of work! Not the dive itself, but just preparing for it. My new dive computer has a digital compass; it's MUCH different from a regular compass. I rewatched the online course about my computer, but I was still confused. I watched it several times in fact, with my computer in my hands, and STILL couldn't figure it out. I was getting really frustrated.

And to make things even more hair-pulling, the manual is only on a CD-rom. Great, but I only have my iPad and netbook here, neither of which has a disc drive. Argh! I explained my dilemma to a friend who bought the same computer after I got mine, and he saved the day! He downloaded the manual on his computer and converted it to a PDF file and emailed it to me. Success! From there, figuring out the compass feature was not too difficult.

Once again, the parallel to my classroom made me smile. What seemed to be a relatively simple task required a lot more work, background research, and help from friends than I ever thought it would. The key, it seems, is to persevere.

I had to take said compass and swim a square and a triangle. I gotta say, teaching math made this a breeze (once I knew how to work the darned compass). The square was just perfect, and I counted kick cycles to make sure each side was the same length. My instructor followed behind me with some line and marked each side and corner so we could assess it when I finished. The triangle was not quite isosceles, but really close! Hey, he didn't specify, so I went with an acute triangle!

I learned a lot in doing this course. Although I had theoretically "done" all the types of dives required (save for the navigation), being taught by a professional gave me insight into things that aren't in the AOW book and the one on one instruction was fantastic.

There is an argument for smaller class sizes in there somewhere...