I will have to give a huge shout out to the people of Dive n' Surf (http://divensurf.com/). They hooked me up with a great class, a professional instructor group, and a great time. They are also going to put me in contact with some great people in Australia to go dive the Barrier Reef with. They are a complete and total class act, me that's a different story, told below.
Friday afternoon I headed over to dive and surf to pick up my gear for the weekend. Included in the price of my class were two full air tanks, a wet suit and hood, buoyancy compensator, regulator (or reg as we veterans say), a 25 lb weight belt, and an unnatural encounter with the old barnacle who runs the rental department. FYI: The weight belt helps you sink in water because the wet suit makes you so buoyant.
Saturday Morning, I was not raptured which meant I rolled out of bed and drug my week-weary self down to Veteran's Park in Redondo Beach. I slapped on 50 pounds of gear and threw myself into the frigid ocean out of the frigid air for what was supposed to be two dives. The surf was up and I knew after I watched our instructor drag the drowning high school girl in our class through the breakers as she spit salt water out of her nose it would be a short day. We did one dive, I saw a shrimp and a crab- they were breath-taking (there needs to be a sarcasm font).
4:30 AM. Beep Beep. That's how I started my Sunday. 13 hours later I drug my exhausted body off the Catalina Express and went almost immediately to bed- not of course without a little help from my friend Cabernet.
In between, I drove 30 minutes south to Long Beach, WITHOUT coffee, which is criminal in the continental 48, hopped on the ferry, slept, drooled all over myself, and awoke at Catalina as quite the vision of loveliness. I will say that by now that 50 lbs of gear, I lugged to the ferry at about 100 lbs- pre-dawn will do that to you. We dived right in and spent the next 1.5 hours in freezing water doing skills that made me feel like a football player asked to dance ballet: bull in a china shop, and that was the first dive. However uncoordinated I felt, I still saw a ton of fish, rays, crabs, sea cucumbers, kelp- all in stunning HD which made me feel accomplished. After 2 more dives, which were thankfully about 30 minutes, I hauled myself out a champion, the dorky picture below is me, certified open water scuba man:
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