Saturday, 03 April 2004

Swimming with the fishes. The reason for light blogging this month is that I'm learning how to scuba dive. I spent most of my spare time last week reading up on regulators and nitrogen narcosis and other exciting diving safety lessons, and spent most of today watching instructional videos and being tested on what I'd learned. We tried on our diving equipment for the first time today (it feels like wearing a big metal tortoise shell) and tomorrow we go into the pool for our first lessons on breathing.

(The first rule of scuba diving: Never stop breathing. If you inhale a lungful of air from your scuba tank, hold your breath, and then ascend, the air expands in volume and your lungs will rupture like leaky balloons. You don't have this problem during normal swimming, because you can never inhale more than one lungful x 1 atmosphere; with scuba gear you can inhale up to five times as many molecules, all packed together by the water pressure. It's like how the air is thinner at the top of a mountain, only in reverse.)

After we finish our lessons here in Sydney, my lady-love and I are off to Heron Island, to complete our training and dive the Great Barrier Reef. I'm hoping to equip my digital camera for underwater photography (I think there's some kind of waterproof shell you can buy), so ideally I'll bring back pictures.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 10:19 am. comments.