Everyone drive to key largo, you dive, rest of family check out pennekamp state park, maybe take a snorkel, kayak, or glass bottom boat tours. Afterwards enjoy lunch at one of many excellent restaurants there together.
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If they ask for your certification just say you are a AOW but have dived only a few times. on the dive site, most of the time, you would be buddied with a random person unless the dive instructor/ DM thinks that you would be safer with him as your buddy. Unlike your training dives, you will all stay as a group and move as a group with your buddy being your primary concern so you would feel safer along side lots of other divers. One tip I have to give is just try and relax and enjoy the moment, once you start to worry you would start panicking and it might cause others to panic as well. Have fun divingI'm going to the Keys on Thursday and we're staying in Marathon. Even though the reason for this trip was for Mother's Day, I've gotten the OK from the wife go to diving. I'm planning on trying to do a 2 tank dive trip Saturday morning.
Quick back story is that I got certified in March with OW and AOW. It was a total of 9 dives, and prior to that, I had 6 under my belt, 3 being DSD, and 3 being the first 3 of OW (on my first attempt - got sick and couldn't finish).
Now that I am going to be able to just dive, I'm a little intimidated by it. I really enjoyed the whole group feel to doing the OW and AOW dives, as we had a group of 8 for OW and 12 for AOW. We were all newbs and learning as we went, and I definitely could feel my skills progress in the 9 dives.
But now that I won't be with that group, I am a bit anxious/nervous about it. I'd like to do a shallower dive (30-40 ft maybe) so that I could just enjoy it and also work on my buoyancy a bit, as well as focusing on slowing my breathing down to last longer in the water. At the same time, I don't want to book a trip that has a bunch of experienced divers on it and then feel like a 5th wheel.
So I guess what I'm asking is, when booking and calling dive shops, what do I really say? Do I let them know my experience up front and what I'm looking for in a dive, and they will either say they can take me or not? Will I typically be buddied up with someone random when we get there, or will be go down in a more 'group' setting like we did when I did my training dives? When we did our training dives, there was also a group of 2 who were already certified that went down with one of the dive masters of the company and they just did their own thing. Is it going to be something like that?
I guess I'm just looking at what I should expect in this case, as I've never been in this situation and a bit intimidated by it.
About 10 seconds after jumping in my first dive we saw like a 6ft shark swim right by, which kinda spoiled it because I expected to see that stuff the whole time lol, but that was the only reef shark we saw.
Glad to hear you enjoyed it - post qualification dives are a whole lot different to dives under instruction. On a course it is up to the instructor to ensure everything is done safely - once you qualify the onus shifts to you and your buddy to make sure you are safe between you.It was definitely different this time versus my OW dives in the sense that everything was on me. As soon as we stopped the boat, he was in the water and the other person on deck told me when I was ready she would help get me out of the holder thing and then that was it, when I was ready to stride off the boat I just went. Gave her the OK and that was it.
Then when we were diving, I didn't have someone asking me every 5 minutes for my air and worrying about me the whole time. It definitely made me feel like now it's my responsibility to monitor everything, and I did check my air very frequently. The only time I told him my air was at the halfway point (1900 PSI) so that we could start the turn back. But basically other than that, I kind of just followed him around and we were doing basic communication underwater without issue.
It definitely made me feel very comfortable in myself. Prior to diving, even yesterday, I was kind of psyching myself out. But about a minute after being in the water, I felt super comfortable, although my mask was leaking because I had my snorkel on the inside of my strap, which I didn't realize until like 40 minutes into the dive. I fixed that before our second dive and it made the second one easier without having to clear my mask so often.
My next dive is probably going to be down here again in September with some buddies but I wish I could do it more often.