So, May 2014, a fat old man (54) travels to Thailand and earns his Open Water...
Early September 2015, same (still fat) old man (55) travels to Anilao (3rd time in 15 months) and comes home with his Rescue Diver, Deep Specialty, and Master Scuba Diver...
My local instructor felt like I had a pretty interesting progression as I worked to achieve these goals, and that the timing and selection of my different specialties were a good case study... so I thought I'd present them here and see what people think about them... and perhaps share my future goals...
So, let's review...
2004 - first actual diving experience, in Sanya, Hainan China (@ Dahai, not Yalong Bay)... one dive was run by a Chinese dive shop, geared us (me, wife, and 18, 16, 14, 12 year old kids) all up, no training, then had us all go down to the bottom (12 m) one at a time (starting with my wife, then the smaller kids, then my boys, and finally me)... vis was probably 5m, nothing but sand and an occiasional rock, we swam around on the bottom for 15 minutes, then everyone followed him up a line and surfaced, climbed out onto a raft and we were done... my one son and one daughter loved it so much that we went back... but this time to a dive 'shop' run by Chinese Navy divers (Chinese military is kind of weird, these guys were stationed here, and were all good divers as you might expect for military frogmen, but they get paid nothing as sailors, so to pad their penniless pockets, they were allowed to run this little 'tour dive' activity from the dock out front... so, again they gear us up (both places only offered harnesses and a tank with a single second stage, no octo)... we go out to the same raft, they take us down closer to some rocks along the sea wall, we see a couple crabs, and a couple fish, and we go back up... vis sucks, it's colder than the day before without a wetsuit, we are done...
2012 - wife and I go to Bohol Panglao Island (on Alona Beach) in the Phlippines... on a whim, we walk into a dive shop and end up scheduling a DSD dive for the next day, a few hours later, we are in the pool, learning some basic skills and practicing before the next day... next day, the weather has changed, it's overcast, we go out on a banca, get dropped, and descend, but it's a little dark, I'm feeling claustrophobic, and when we drop over the edge of the reef onto the wall, my wife is terrified (even though Jean Phillipe - a Frenchman who she still remembers with ou-la-la), and I'm thinking, this is the last time we are doing this crazy thing...
Feb 2014 - it's Spring Festival, and my wife and I have decided to vacation on Koh Lanta with our adult niece who is still recovering emotionally from the death of her father and boyfriend over the course of a few weeks two years before... there's a dive shop on the beach in front of our 'resort' (Lanta Island Resort) and she thinks she'd like to go, I think I'd better go with... my wife is ABSOLUTELY NOT, but I'll ride on the boat.. so, again, we are in the pool that afternoon, do the skills, practice, and next morning we meet the boat and go out to Koh Ha almost two hours away... but the dives are amazing, our instructor is a Brit with a great sense for our skills and comfort (except for my claustrophic feeling where I want to bolt to the surface every so often)... we end up doing three dives that day with him... on the last he says he's going to show us the entry to a 'cave/swim thru' that we can't go in, but we can look into... cue the panic attack... I'm floating above what I think is the opening, and it's dinner plate sized... and the thought of that restriction overcomes my common sense and I am headed back to the surface... he catches me before I get there and calms me down, and then we finish he dive... and by the end, I am 'hooked'.
May 2014 - the 'season' is all but over in Koh Lanta, and of course I could have gone anywhere to finish my OW, but I decide this shop, these people are the ones I want to do it with... as luck has it, I spend a day studying and in the pool a couple times, then we dive for four days, and I get some shallow water skills practice and then open water repeats of everything... but on day three, I'm done with Open Water, and I get to make a few laps around the boat to prove it... the next day we do my first AOW dive with a deep dive near Hin Muang, and on my 11th total dive, I not only SEE a whale shark, but it swims right into me...
June 2014 - I get home from Thailand and I'm dive crazy... I just want to train.. so I immediately schedule a trip to Anilao with my local dive shop (or as local as it gets in a city the size of Shanghai) to complete my AOW... during the first dive, I have my famous "out of air" experience, and literally breath my tank to the last breath ... the instructor must have thought to himself "is this guy serious?" while I was floating there slicing across my throat, but he handed me the octo and we both understood how fast I can burn thru 70bar of air when I'm working (and what 'working' to a fat old man means)... the rest of the trip is awesome, I'm learning advanced nav, practicing buoyancy skills, drifting, learning about new fish, and making a couple of other awesome deep dives that allow me to see things well below the surface (one a pygmy seahorse living on a gorgonian fan that sticks off a rock at 27m, and a really cool sunken helicopter wreck just off the house reef at 30m)... I come home feeling pretty good with being an 'advanced diver' (AOW) and still not smart enough to realize how little I know...
Immediately after I'm back and before my AOW C-card arrives, I'm studying, and over the weekend complete my EAN cert so I can dive nitrox.
July 2014 - there's nothing to do, so I go to a local aquarium and dive to 16m for fun... and then decide I need to get my EFR, so another full week of study, review, videos, and refreshing my training from the military in emergency first responding and I have a great time... it's much more fun to tap someone on the clavicle and say "Hey, buddy, are you all right? I'm an emergency first responder, may I help you?" than, "hey, buddy, you look like you're bleeding, I'm a combat lifesaver, I'm gonna do my best to help you!"
A couple weeks later, I'm in San Pedro, CA, I'm so hooked, that I have paid for my wife and son-in-law to get their OW (yeah, my wife thought she'd humor me, and that this fixation would pass... she suffered thru surf entries and the stairs at Ventura, but earned her OW thanks to patient people at Pacific Wilderness - I wonder if they didn't think it would be a fleeting interest and she'd give it up too?)... but for me, since they are getting qualified, I call my brother weeks in advance and beg him to come to California so we can all go dive Catalina for a day...
To prep for that, I've already bought a nice used dry suit (here off SB) and of course decide it's best to get trained on how to use it... so my wife's instructor is now mine, and we are in the pool the day I land in California for skills work (which goes well), and after a knowledge review and discussion about the video, next day we all meet up on the boat for our trip. Which goes pretty famously except for the vis being so -so.
Sep 2014 - it's a short holiday in China, my wife wants to see Anilao, so we decide to invite her teaching partner along and go for three days of diving... the only thing I find out from this experience is that equipment can break at BAD times (my new BCD has the inflator hose break off the shoulder as we exit from our check dive)...
It's about this time I start thinking about doing my Rescue diver, but I still only have 32 dives, so I drop it, but in the back of my mind I'm telling myself I'd like to learn more and maybe 'teach' scuba diving at some point...
Well, from there ensues about 9 months of just 'diving', I travel to Saipan, Taiwan, and at Christmas, we bring all the kids to Asia and stay at Puerto Galera for a week, where everyone finishes their OW, and we end up diving as a family. I manage 20 dives over 6 days.... in February, it's back to Koh Lanta where my wife wants to finish her AOW, but ends up breaking her foot and needing surgery... then in March this year, I finally get my student pack for Rescue... I make a couple trips in April to Taiwan (one where my wife finishes AOW), and I'm also signed up for a dive for June to Coron... I watch the rescue video twice, I spend an entire day at the dive shop watching it a third time and doing my knowledge reviews... but life catches up and now Coron in on my mind, and I'm hating my SAC, but I'm not being good at losing weight, so I come up with a plan... CARRY MORE AIR!!!
June 2015 - And the way to do that, is to go SIDEMOUNT, and since I'm going to Coron anyway, I decide to double down and get my WRECK specialty too... which of course being a relatively new and naive diver comes with a tad more studying, skills with new equipment, and some very challenging training prior to the trip in the pool with the new configuration, and then in open water, the real challenges of facing currents, navigating, sharing, freeflow malfunctions, clipping/unclipping, fitting the rig, and of course, working in and around wrecks... I have to say, 13 dives, 10 of them on wrecks and all sidemount and I was loving diving even more... not only that, but I hit my 100th dive in Coron... which to me was a big deal since it also coincided with feeling more comfortable in the water 'alone', I might be diving with a buddy, or my instructor, but it's about this time I finally felt like I was 'self-reliant' and wasn't following or relying on them for my safety during a dive...
Let me say this... even if you are an instructor, if you haven't seen the new SIDEMOUNT student manual, you should get one and look it over... it's a brilliant piece of training material compared to some of the other stuff PADI has put out... I've been in or doing training for most of my career in different jobs, and this is a good book... there is still a lot of improvement PADI could do with just little tweaks that just mystifies me why they can't do it... I'm hoping this is a step in that direction.
I'll say that another dive to southern China on a whim actually had something to do with it... I ended up spending some time 'solo' (near the boat and other divers) where we were diving in the same 'area' but couldn't see each other unless we were 2-3 meters apart... you'd see them, and then they were gone... and I wasn't 'paired' with another diver, so I was kind of 'solo', but even with the vis, and even with being separated a good amount of time, I didn't feel any panic, or lack of ability to deal with the situation... I attributed this to two things 1) redundant air supply, 2) enough time diving, and practicing skills I felt like I was 'self-reliant'...
So, July 2015 - the wife and I have a 'super trip' planned with her brother and his wife, we've planned it for six months, and finally we meet up in Dallas and fly to Saba in the Eastern Caribbean... (near Saint Martens)... we spend a week there, I get in 11 dives including a night dive, and a three monster DEEP dives on the pinnacles that are like nothing I've seen... especially at 3rd Encounter... the whole time, again that sense of confidence, I'm spending more time thinking about my wife and her safety as she's having issues with really understanding her dive watch and NDL procedures... but it's another sign I might be ready for rescue...
August 2015 - I'm scheduled to go to Subic, I want to do Tech40, but work comes first, I'm OBE (overcome by events) and have to cancel, losing my airfare, but hopefully I get at least a partial credit on my training fees later this fall... truth be told, three weeks later, I realize that this training was probably out of synch with my progression, and that the missed trip probably was a blessing in disguise, even with my new found confidence (or over-confidence).
September 2015 - the Chinese don't like the Japanese much, still after nearly 70 years, if you've ever been to Nanjing (kind of like visiting the holocaust museum in Washington, DC), you'll know why, but regardless, they are remembering the end of the war in the Pacific after 70 years, so there's a newly scheduled long holiday, and back in June, I scheduled the trip... with it quickly coming close, I decide it's time to do my Rescue, but I also want to do my DEEP so I'm better prepared for Tech40 when I can get around to it... with that in mind, my instructor meets with me to review my Rescue knowledge reviews and the use of oxygen again, we decide we'll use a couple dives in Anilao for confined water training for rescue, and work the scenarios in to that and whatever other sessions we can... there's plenty of places to find our deep dives, so I work on that as well.
Starting with a tired diver and progressing to finding an unresponsive diver at the bottom and having to bring them to the surface, then assist them as non-breathing and take it in to shore... RESCUE was not "hard" so much as it was mentally challenging to realize that in all the places and environments I'd been in the last 15 months I might have needed the ability to use these skills... how much of a nightmare would it be to find an unresponsive diver in the middle of a wreck, outside the light zone, at 30m? I grant that their odds of survival aren't great, and especially if I'm the fat old guy that finds them... but I realized that regardless of that... in that situation, I'm still their best bet for survival, so I take that responsibility and the fact that in that situation, my own safety might end up outweighing my ability to complete the task... like I said, I found myself with the feelings I had after completing 'combat lifesaver' many years ago in the Army... and realizing that having the knowledge doesn't always equate the the ability or capability to do so...
That said, I did complete RESCUE and I'm proud of it. I also finished my DEEP specialty, and I found that it was a great foundation for Tech40 when I take it... of my few 130+ dives to date, nearly 1/2 have been deep (18-40m)... and of those, about 2/3 between 20-30m... I learned a lot during deep, we did two NDL dives to 40m to do the deep dive skills divers do for AOW and see if it's any different... I learned that 40m is a huge difference from 30m, and that 35m is tons better than 40m for mental accuity, and 30m is a pretty decent limit to be sure you aren't fighting the effects of nitrogen narcosis... again, things that I believe will be important in Tech40.
So there it is, I have to admit that as I was about to finish Rescue that I did note I only needed one more specialty to qualify for Master Scuba Diver... but I'm still very glad I did DEEP because even with all those dives, I learned a lot about myself, my diving environment, and my comfort level below the 30m mark... maybe Master Scuba Diver is a hokey symbol in the PADI world, but on the other hand, even if I don't have 5000 dives, I feel like I've put the work into being a stronger, smarter diver...
And I've seen that losing my weight, and improving my fitness are next steps to actually BEING that guy...
So what is ahead of me? well, I'm planning on either the SELF-RELIANT, or SOLO diver courses... and I've picked up my Divemaster packet, and I'm goning to take a few months to digest that and see if I can't manage my weight and my training... I'm not in a hurry, but I do love learning and growing...
Cheers, another trip next week!!
PhatD1ver
Early September 2015, same (still fat) old man (55) travels to Anilao (3rd time in 15 months) and comes home with his Rescue Diver, Deep Specialty, and Master Scuba Diver...
My local instructor felt like I had a pretty interesting progression as I worked to achieve these goals, and that the timing and selection of my different specialties were a good case study... so I thought I'd present them here and see what people think about them... and perhaps share my future goals...
So, let's review...
2004 - first actual diving experience, in Sanya, Hainan China (@ Dahai, not Yalong Bay)... one dive was run by a Chinese dive shop, geared us (me, wife, and 18, 16, 14, 12 year old kids) all up, no training, then had us all go down to the bottom (12 m) one at a time (starting with my wife, then the smaller kids, then my boys, and finally me)... vis was probably 5m, nothing but sand and an occiasional rock, we swam around on the bottom for 15 minutes, then everyone followed him up a line and surfaced, climbed out onto a raft and we were done... my one son and one daughter loved it so much that we went back... but this time to a dive 'shop' run by Chinese Navy divers (Chinese military is kind of weird, these guys were stationed here, and were all good divers as you might expect for military frogmen, but they get paid nothing as sailors, so to pad their penniless pockets, they were allowed to run this little 'tour dive' activity from the dock out front... so, again they gear us up (both places only offered harnesses and a tank with a single second stage, no octo)... we go out to the same raft, they take us down closer to some rocks along the sea wall, we see a couple crabs, and a couple fish, and we go back up... vis sucks, it's colder than the day before without a wetsuit, we are done...
2012 - wife and I go to Bohol Panglao Island (on Alona Beach) in the Phlippines... on a whim, we walk into a dive shop and end up scheduling a DSD dive for the next day, a few hours later, we are in the pool, learning some basic skills and practicing before the next day... next day, the weather has changed, it's overcast, we go out on a banca, get dropped, and descend, but it's a little dark, I'm feeling claustrophobic, and when we drop over the edge of the reef onto the wall, my wife is terrified (even though Jean Phillipe - a Frenchman who she still remembers with ou-la-la), and I'm thinking, this is the last time we are doing this crazy thing...
Feb 2014 - it's Spring Festival, and my wife and I have decided to vacation on Koh Lanta with our adult niece who is still recovering emotionally from the death of her father and boyfriend over the course of a few weeks two years before... there's a dive shop on the beach in front of our 'resort' (Lanta Island Resort) and she thinks she'd like to go, I think I'd better go with... my wife is ABSOLUTELY NOT, but I'll ride on the boat.. so, again, we are in the pool that afternoon, do the skills, practice, and next morning we meet the boat and go out to Koh Ha almost two hours away... but the dives are amazing, our instructor is a Brit with a great sense for our skills and comfort (except for my claustrophic feeling where I want to bolt to the surface every so often)... we end up doing three dives that day with him... on the last he says he's going to show us the entry to a 'cave/swim thru' that we can't go in, but we can look into... cue the panic attack... I'm floating above what I think is the opening, and it's dinner plate sized... and the thought of that restriction overcomes my common sense and I am headed back to the surface... he catches me before I get there and calms me down, and then we finish he dive... and by the end, I am 'hooked'.
May 2014 - the 'season' is all but over in Koh Lanta, and of course I could have gone anywhere to finish my OW, but I decide this shop, these people are the ones I want to do it with... as luck has it, I spend a day studying and in the pool a couple times, then we dive for four days, and I get some shallow water skills practice and then open water repeats of everything... but on day three, I'm done with Open Water, and I get to make a few laps around the boat to prove it... the next day we do my first AOW dive with a deep dive near Hin Muang, and on my 11th total dive, I not only SEE a whale shark, but it swims right into me...
June 2014 - I get home from Thailand and I'm dive crazy... I just want to train.. so I immediately schedule a trip to Anilao with my local dive shop (or as local as it gets in a city the size of Shanghai) to complete my AOW... during the first dive, I have my famous "out of air" experience, and literally breath my tank to the last breath ... the instructor must have thought to himself "is this guy serious?" while I was floating there slicing across my throat, but he handed me the octo and we both understood how fast I can burn thru 70bar of air when I'm working (and what 'working' to a fat old man means)... the rest of the trip is awesome, I'm learning advanced nav, practicing buoyancy skills, drifting, learning about new fish, and making a couple of other awesome deep dives that allow me to see things well below the surface (one a pygmy seahorse living on a gorgonian fan that sticks off a rock at 27m, and a really cool sunken helicopter wreck just off the house reef at 30m)... I come home feeling pretty good with being an 'advanced diver' (AOW) and still not smart enough to realize how little I know...
Immediately after I'm back and before my AOW C-card arrives, I'm studying, and over the weekend complete my EAN cert so I can dive nitrox.
July 2014 - there's nothing to do, so I go to a local aquarium and dive to 16m for fun... and then decide I need to get my EFR, so another full week of study, review, videos, and refreshing my training from the military in emergency first responding and I have a great time... it's much more fun to tap someone on the clavicle and say "Hey, buddy, are you all right? I'm an emergency first responder, may I help you?" than, "hey, buddy, you look like you're bleeding, I'm a combat lifesaver, I'm gonna do my best to help you!"
A couple weeks later, I'm in San Pedro, CA, I'm so hooked, that I have paid for my wife and son-in-law to get their OW (yeah, my wife thought she'd humor me, and that this fixation would pass... she suffered thru surf entries and the stairs at Ventura, but earned her OW thanks to patient people at Pacific Wilderness - I wonder if they didn't think it would be a fleeting interest and she'd give it up too?)... but for me, since they are getting qualified, I call my brother weeks in advance and beg him to come to California so we can all go dive Catalina for a day...
To prep for that, I've already bought a nice used dry suit (here off SB) and of course decide it's best to get trained on how to use it... so my wife's instructor is now mine, and we are in the pool the day I land in California for skills work (which goes well), and after a knowledge review and discussion about the video, next day we all meet up on the boat for our trip. Which goes pretty famously except for the vis being so -so.
Sep 2014 - it's a short holiday in China, my wife wants to see Anilao, so we decide to invite her teaching partner along and go for three days of diving... the only thing I find out from this experience is that equipment can break at BAD times (my new BCD has the inflator hose break off the shoulder as we exit from our check dive)...
It's about this time I start thinking about doing my Rescue diver, but I still only have 32 dives, so I drop it, but in the back of my mind I'm telling myself I'd like to learn more and maybe 'teach' scuba diving at some point...
Well, from there ensues about 9 months of just 'diving', I travel to Saipan, Taiwan, and at Christmas, we bring all the kids to Asia and stay at Puerto Galera for a week, where everyone finishes their OW, and we end up diving as a family. I manage 20 dives over 6 days.... in February, it's back to Koh Lanta where my wife wants to finish her AOW, but ends up breaking her foot and needing surgery... then in March this year, I finally get my student pack for Rescue... I make a couple trips in April to Taiwan (one where my wife finishes AOW), and I'm also signed up for a dive for June to Coron... I watch the rescue video twice, I spend an entire day at the dive shop watching it a third time and doing my knowledge reviews... but life catches up and now Coron in on my mind, and I'm hating my SAC, but I'm not being good at losing weight, so I come up with a plan... CARRY MORE AIR!!!
June 2015 - And the way to do that, is to go SIDEMOUNT, and since I'm going to Coron anyway, I decide to double down and get my WRECK specialty too... which of course being a relatively new and naive diver comes with a tad more studying, skills with new equipment, and some very challenging training prior to the trip in the pool with the new configuration, and then in open water, the real challenges of facing currents, navigating, sharing, freeflow malfunctions, clipping/unclipping, fitting the rig, and of course, working in and around wrecks... I have to say, 13 dives, 10 of them on wrecks and all sidemount and I was loving diving even more... not only that, but I hit my 100th dive in Coron... which to me was a big deal since it also coincided with feeling more comfortable in the water 'alone', I might be diving with a buddy, or my instructor, but it's about this time I finally felt like I was 'self-reliant' and wasn't following or relying on them for my safety during a dive...
Let me say this... even if you are an instructor, if you haven't seen the new SIDEMOUNT student manual, you should get one and look it over... it's a brilliant piece of training material compared to some of the other stuff PADI has put out... I've been in or doing training for most of my career in different jobs, and this is a good book... there is still a lot of improvement PADI could do with just little tweaks that just mystifies me why they can't do it... I'm hoping this is a step in that direction.
I'll say that another dive to southern China on a whim actually had something to do with it... I ended up spending some time 'solo' (near the boat and other divers) where we were diving in the same 'area' but couldn't see each other unless we were 2-3 meters apart... you'd see them, and then they were gone... and I wasn't 'paired' with another diver, so I was kind of 'solo', but even with the vis, and even with being separated a good amount of time, I didn't feel any panic, or lack of ability to deal with the situation... I attributed this to two things 1) redundant air supply, 2) enough time diving, and practicing skills I felt like I was 'self-reliant'...
So, July 2015 - the wife and I have a 'super trip' planned with her brother and his wife, we've planned it for six months, and finally we meet up in Dallas and fly to Saba in the Eastern Caribbean... (near Saint Martens)... we spend a week there, I get in 11 dives including a night dive, and a three monster DEEP dives on the pinnacles that are like nothing I've seen... especially at 3rd Encounter... the whole time, again that sense of confidence, I'm spending more time thinking about my wife and her safety as she's having issues with really understanding her dive watch and NDL procedures... but it's another sign I might be ready for rescue...
August 2015 - I'm scheduled to go to Subic, I want to do Tech40, but work comes first, I'm OBE (overcome by events) and have to cancel, losing my airfare, but hopefully I get at least a partial credit on my training fees later this fall... truth be told, three weeks later, I realize that this training was probably out of synch with my progression, and that the missed trip probably was a blessing in disguise, even with my new found confidence (or over-confidence).
September 2015 - the Chinese don't like the Japanese much, still after nearly 70 years, if you've ever been to Nanjing (kind of like visiting the holocaust museum in Washington, DC), you'll know why, but regardless, they are remembering the end of the war in the Pacific after 70 years, so there's a newly scheduled long holiday, and back in June, I scheduled the trip... with it quickly coming close, I decide it's time to do my Rescue, but I also want to do my DEEP so I'm better prepared for Tech40 when I can get around to it... with that in mind, my instructor meets with me to review my Rescue knowledge reviews and the use of oxygen again, we decide we'll use a couple dives in Anilao for confined water training for rescue, and work the scenarios in to that and whatever other sessions we can... there's plenty of places to find our deep dives, so I work on that as well.
Starting with a tired diver and progressing to finding an unresponsive diver at the bottom and having to bring them to the surface, then assist them as non-breathing and take it in to shore... RESCUE was not "hard" so much as it was mentally challenging to realize that in all the places and environments I'd been in the last 15 months I might have needed the ability to use these skills... how much of a nightmare would it be to find an unresponsive diver in the middle of a wreck, outside the light zone, at 30m? I grant that their odds of survival aren't great, and especially if I'm the fat old guy that finds them... but I realized that regardless of that... in that situation, I'm still their best bet for survival, so I take that responsibility and the fact that in that situation, my own safety might end up outweighing my ability to complete the task... like I said, I found myself with the feelings I had after completing 'combat lifesaver' many years ago in the Army... and realizing that having the knowledge doesn't always equate the the ability or capability to do so...
That said, I did complete RESCUE and I'm proud of it. I also finished my DEEP specialty, and I found that it was a great foundation for Tech40 when I take it... of my few 130+ dives to date, nearly 1/2 have been deep (18-40m)... and of those, about 2/3 between 20-30m... I learned a lot during deep, we did two NDL dives to 40m to do the deep dive skills divers do for AOW and see if it's any different... I learned that 40m is a huge difference from 30m, and that 35m is tons better than 40m for mental accuity, and 30m is a pretty decent limit to be sure you aren't fighting the effects of nitrogen narcosis... again, things that I believe will be important in Tech40.
So there it is, I have to admit that as I was about to finish Rescue that I did note I only needed one more specialty to qualify for Master Scuba Diver... but I'm still very glad I did DEEP because even with all those dives, I learned a lot about myself, my diving environment, and my comfort level below the 30m mark... maybe Master Scuba Diver is a hokey symbol in the PADI world, but on the other hand, even if I don't have 5000 dives, I feel like I've put the work into being a stronger, smarter diver...
And I've seen that losing my weight, and improving my fitness are next steps to actually BEING that guy...
So what is ahead of me? well, I'm planning on either the SELF-RELIANT, or SOLO diver courses... and I've picked up my Divemaster packet, and I'm goning to take a few months to digest that and see if I can't manage my weight and my training... I'm not in a hurry, but I do love learning and growing...
Cheers, another trip next week!!
PhatD1ver
