One of the reason I went to Okinawa, as I said in the introduction post, is that I wanted to learn to dive. Therefore, I registered to the NAUI diving course with a Okinawan school called Reef Encounter for Open Water and Advance Diving courses. They were the cheapest and they are really good. Our instructor spent 800 hours under water in the last year and a half which is like 1.5 hours under water every day. Depending how deep you go that's about the max you can do, I think. So he really knew what he was talking about.
The advantage of a NAUI course is that at the opposite of a diving introduction you have more dives, you can swim by yourself and you can also obtain a certificate to be able to dive by yourself by just buying your own material or renting it on diving sites.
The Open Water course contained 5 dives and the Advance course contained 6 dives. I will let you know about the exercises as we go into this travel series.
The first day (December 22nd) my boyfriend went to take classes at the school while I stayed sleeping. As I was studying in English and him in Japanese, I had to take the classes online. Later, we had our first encounter with the material composed of the diving suit, booties, a buoyancy jacket, fins, a diving mask, weight belt and of course our octopus piece to be attached to the compressed air tank for a preparation dive in the swimming pool.
The first swimming pool's water was really cold and I was really scared that it was going to stay that way all the time even if the sea was supposedly warmer. In the first swimming pool, we did some exercises like mouth piece recovery - the mouth piece is the thing in your mouth that you need to have to breath, so you better be good at finding it if it's knocked away from you accidentally- and taking of and putting our mask back.
Then we went to the second swimming pool which was a little did warmer and a lot deeper (4 meters) and we exercised going down and back to the surface. Going down seems easy, but the deeper you are the faster you sink and that's dangerous for your ear so you have to add some air in your buoyancy vest to be able to sink slowly. Going up is easy too but you need to make sure that the air in your lungs don't expand when the pressure decrease so you need to go back up slowly too (9 meters per minute).
Anyway, let me tell you one funny thing to finish this post. The harder thing to do in diving, is to put on you diving suit. Travel table of content
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