glug glug arrghh!..

I spent the weekend finishing my Introduction chapter for my thesis and learning important stuff about diving. Like how to pee in a wetsuit without anyone noticing and the meaning of some of Andy's more obscene underwater hand signals. I spent about half of my time underwater terified and half exhilerated. I think I'm going to really enjoy myself when there is more to see that the lower half of swimmers and a pool floor. Diving is pretty hard, I'd suddenly shoot up to the surface or smack down onto the pool bottom with only the excrutiating pain in my ears as any sort of warning. By the end I was floating serenly and motionlessly with my legs crossed, feeling quite smug until I suddenly shot up like a cork and breached like a whale. I must be extra floaty- I was wearing 18 pounds of weight by the end while some of the guys were only wearing 2. Maybe it's the breasts :). I forgot about the weight but I remembered pretty damn quickly when I took my BCD off and started to sink. Hence glug glug arrgh. We learn by the mistakes that don't totally drown us.

Some of the stuff we had to do was really horrible, like taking the masks off underwater or trying to breathe from a free flowing regulator (bubbles up the nose, water in the lungs and lots of coughing ensued). I also had the added fun of a leaky purge valve on my mask so I had a continuos slow trickle of water in my nostrils. I was a bit of a slow learner, and once I started freaking out it got harder, but I got the hang of everything. Not bad for a virtual non-swimmer I think :).

Oh yeah the thesis.. grumble grumble, corrections, uggh, fed up is all I have to say about that. We have our checkout dive for the openwater in about 3 weeks, if I can submit by then I can have a really good weekend :).