I'm diving in!

But I just wanna post coz' I'm excited and I'm excited coz' by next weekend I am going to be a PADI certified open water scuba diver! YESsSSSss!!!

I've been wanting to do my scuba diving course since forever, but the normal price for a course is RM1600, which is a bit pricey (not including having to buy or rent dive gear, both of which is also pricey). Being a lover of the deep blue sea who enjoys a good snorkelling sessions every now and, I kept having people tell me that once I've tried scuba diving, snorkelling is just crap. I've seen quite a bit of stuff snorkelling too...black tipped sharks, a manta ray, huge turtles, moray eels, huge fugly looking fish which I'm not even sure what they're called.... and yet people always say that I get to see way cooler stuff when scuba diving (which I'm sure is no exaggeration).

So one day, I'm thinking that it would be great if Groupon could offer a discount on scuba diving. I've already gotten do some pretty cool stuff at discounted prices from this site (such as motorised water sports at Puchong, and next month I'll be doing paintball. After which I think I will take a nice long break from crazy fun Groupon activities for a while). The site has a page for subscribers to give suggestions and feedback, so I wrote them and suggested to post up a discount deal for scuba diving.

Lo and behold, the wonderful people at Groupon answered my wish, and a few weeks later, they had up a deal for scuba diving at Rm990, and I think I was one of the first 5 people to buy it. And the way this site works is that every discount deal requires a minimum number of buyers to become activated, and if it doesn't reach the minimum number, then those who bought don't get to use the deal and we get a refund. So the minimum number of people required for this deal was 30 poeple, and once I bought it, I kept going back to the page to see if there were enough buyers... and the number went up ssooooo slowly. But not only did it eventually get past 30 buyers, on the last day before the deal closed, the number of buyers went up to 139 people! And after talking to my dive instructor, she said even she was surprised at how the number went up so expectedly. :P So anyway, Groupon is so awesome for helping me save RM610 for my diving course. Which I can use to by my wet suit and other diving gear. :)

Of course, we scuba diving wannabes don't jump into water without prior training! All of us got a PADI instruction manual to start us off learning about the theory.

I personally love this manual coz' it's explains technical stuff in a very easy manner, even has some humour in it, and has a lot of small quizes and reviews after every chapter which really helps us to remember what we've read. It makes me wish all my school textbooks had been written like this. Would have make learning history a lot more interesting! :P

Then I spent the whole of last Tuesday (which was a holiday) doing two of my pool sessions back to back, purpose of which is to get used to the dive equipment and be trained on various specific skills we need to know when in the water. We were split into two groups of 5 and 6 people each, and each group had an instructor. And I have pictures!

Suited up and ready to rumble, but not before some shameless camwhoring :)

Here's my group's instructor (the Indian guy) giving some explanation of what we're going to do before we hit the pool.

And they had our gear all laid out for us too. The scuba cylinders were bigger than I thought they would be!

These are our BCDs (buoyancy control devices) which is the thing that helps us to sink or float in the water. Which is pretty important when diving, as you might guess.

We were taught how to attach our regulators (the thingy we breathe through when underwater) and scuba cylinder to the BCDs. And lugging around a huge oxygen tank strapped to our back it not easy too!

The regulator has quite a few tubes sticking everywhere, and if I don't strap it down properly, it just kinda all hangs out and that's not supposed to happen. In the ocean, it may drag along stuff and injure corals, and other things. Out of the water, it just looks like some weird alien dangly thing stuck to me.

Of course, all the weird alien dangly thingies are necessary for staying alive underwater. :)

So anyway, I just did my diving exam today and got 96% for it! Weee! And next weekend I'll be going to Perhentian for my ocean diving sessions, and then I get certified! Double weeee!!!