Scuba Diving - Fun and Terrifying!

It's our second to last day on Lombok. While we were here, we spent a week on Gili Tranwangan scuba diving. 

Scuba diving was great. I haven't done such a great thing in a long time. And it was on my bucket list, so I got to cross out an item. 

However, things didn't go so smoothly. They never do. When we started watching the first education video of our diving course, I realized that I was afraid of diving. I had been aware of my fear of the underwater world, like sharks, octopuses, manta rays, corals and nudibranch (sea snails), but here I realized that I was also afraid of the diving activity itself. The first video kept warning not to hold your breath underwater as that may result in serious injury or even death. How do you not hold your breath underwater? It's a reflex! The video repeated the warning so many times that I got even more scared. 

Then there was all the theory. Before we got to do any actual diving, we had to watch several videos, consult a manual and answer questions on paper. How much denser does air become when it is 30 metres underwater? (Four times denser.) What are the symptoms of decompression sickness? (I can't remember.) How many hours do you have to wait before you go on an airplane after a dive? (12 hours.) What do you do if you get separated from your diving buddy* while underwater? (Look for no more than a minute, then ascend, make a safety stop of three minutes at depth of 5 metres, and reunite at the surface.) Can you touch dead poisonous organisms? (No, you really shouldn't. A dead lion fish, for example, can still poison you.)

Don't get me wrong. I love theory and studying it. I spent nine years at university. But all those questions made me think that diving must be a really seriously dangerous activity if you have to study so much for it. It had been so different with surfing, after all. The instructor just pushed me into my first wave like it was nothing. (He did ask me if I could swim though.) 

Aside from the theory, there was the complicated diving equipment. Again, different to surfing. Human beings cannot survive underwater, so we need equipment to dive. This was unsettling for two reasons. First being that there was just so much new and complicated equipment to learn! LPI, SPG, BCD... How can I go do something dangerous if I can't understand the very equipment that is supposed to keep me alive? And second reason being that there's just something quite disturbing about constructing so much complicated tools to do something that human beings weren't meant to do in the first place. It feels like being on an airplane. It's unnatural. Human beings aren't supposed to be breathing underwater. It feels wrong. It's like tricking mother nature or something. I don't know whether she likes to be tricked like that. 

Slowly we familiarized ourselves with all the new equipment and learned the theory. Then we went to practice in the pool. 

In a PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) Open Water Diver course you have a lot of skills to learn. For example. Emptying your mask if it's full of water. Taking your mask off and putting it back on, underwater of course. Doing a CESA (Controlled Emergency Swimming Ascent) which means swimming 9 metres in 30 seconds on a single breath. Giving air to your buddy if he or she runs out. Taking out a cramp of your or your buddy's leg. Hovering – which proved to be the hardest skill for me to learn. 

Hovering means maintaining neutral boyancy underwater i.e. staying in one place without sinking to the bottom or rising to the surface. You are supposed to control your boyancy by breathing. Breathing is a big deal underwater. Unlike what we're used to on land, when you're underwater, one breath can move you one meter up or down. It's a funny feeling. On one hand you're not doing anything special – just breathing. On the other hand, one breath makes a difference whether you float safely away from the bottom or crach into a deadly poisonous scorpion fish sitting under you. 

I don't even know why hovering was so difficult for me. I do yoga. I meditate. I thought I was a good breather. Apparently not. Periodically, I would either rise to the surface like a cork, or crash to the bottom like a rock. Hovering is much more difficult than it sounds. 

Some of the skills we did on the surface, some underwater. Some in the pool, some in the ocean (called "open water"), some in both. At some point I realized that learning all these skills – aside from being intimidating – provides the comfortable feeling of being even slightly in coltrol during dives. 

Still, the first time I experienced even slight comfort was on our fifth dive, after the course was already done and over. Open Water Diver course includes four open water dives (aside from a few pool dives for practice) – an amount that wasn't enough for me to get used to the activity. Thankfully we had a day to spare after the course, so we decided to go on two additional "Fun Dives" – where I finally relaxed enough to enjoy it. 

Not that I didn't enjoy it before. My enjoyment was just clouded by so much terror that I couldn't really feel it. After our first dive, I actually said, "That's it. I'm done. That was horrible. I'm never doing that again." And cried. 

It wasn't that the diving was actually horrible. We didn't see any terrifying sharks. Nothing went wrong with our equipment. The current was moderate. Visibility was great. The dive was 42 minutes long. It included practicing a few skills underwater and just swimming around looking at colorful fish, coral and friendly-looking turtles. Objectively, everything went great. 

I was terrified, because going scuba diving is like going to space (not that I've been to space, yet). The underwater world feels like a parallel reality. Putting your head underwater, taking those first breaths, descending deeper... feels like descending into the rabbit hole. It's a place so close and yet so far. The underwater world is present everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Seeing a fish on a restaurant menu or in a supermarket is not the same as seeing that same fish in its natural habitat eating, playing with its friends or building a nest.

The representation of the underwater life that we get from our education and the media is so far from the real thing that it's almost like a joke! Even nature documentaries are not able to capture the slightly eerie and utterly fascinating feeling of floating in a parallel reality. There's a feeling of being there and not really being there that combine in a tryly confusing feeling of questioning your reality, identity and existence. 

That's the terrifying part. 

But I got over it. I tried again and again. Slowly, the terror subsided and I started liking the strangeness of it. 

A small white tip shark

I have to comment that by no means am I advocating that you should do stuff in your life that feels bad or wrong. When I went diving, I didn't feel violated at any point. I didn't feel like someone was doing something bad to me. I didn't feel like anything evil was happening. More like, it was the kind of fear that you get when you watch a really good nature documentary. It's a fear before the truth and the nature of things. It's a realization that you will die and you don't know when, and that life is beautiful, and that nature is merciless and magical at the same time. It's a feeling of being small and at the mercy of life combined with a feeling of being the most powerful creator there is. 

So yeah, diving is great! I recommend everyone do it. 

*diving rule number #2: Never ever dive without a buddy. (#1: Never ever hold your breath.) A buddy is important, because diving is quite dangerous. The buddy provides you with a necessary back-up for help and air if something should happen to your equipment.