Kristie's First Ocean Dives
Cozumel with Dad · April 17-24, 1999

Hi! I'm Kristie Sullivan. I'm a respiratory therapist in Houston, which means I spend my days thinking about breathing, so you'd think scuba would come naturally. You'd be wrong, at first.

I got my open-water certification in March. My checkout dives were in a lake in central Texas, in 61-degree water where I could see about four feet in front of my mask, mostly mud. My dad, Gene Sullivan, has been diving since 1974 and has been trying to get me to learn since I was about twelve, and when I finally did, he took me to Cozumel, Mexico, for my first ocean dives. Ten dives in six days, with my dad beside me every one of them.

Underwater pictures are from a waterproof disposable camera that's good to about 35 feet, so they were all taken at the shallow tops of the reefs or on the way up. Everything comes out blue-green and soft. In real life it was a hundred times better. Click a picture to see it bigger.

The boat	The turtle!!
Grunts	Dad says OK
Dad & me

The boat
We dove with a small dive shop on the island that takes out about ten divers at a time on a fast open boat with a canopy. Our divemaster was Juan, who has eyes in the back of his head, and the captain was Alfonso, who could find the bubbles of ten divers in a two-knot current and pick us all up without anyone ever having to wait. The water is so clear you can see the bottom from the boat in fifty feet. I had never seen water that color except in a crayon box.

What's a drift dive?
Along the southwest side of Cozumel there's a current that runs along the reefs, sometimes slow, sometimes fast. Instead of anchoring and swimming around, the boat drops you at one end of the reef, you go down, and the current carries you along the wall while you just float and look. The boat follows your bubbles and picks you up wherever you come up. It's like riding a slow moving sidewalk past an aquarium.

The first time it terrified me. You can't stop. You see something and before you can point at it, it's gone behind you. I was breathing so fast my first tank lasted thirty-five minutes and Dad's had half left. He swam right next to me with his hand near my tank valve the whole time and kept giving me the "slow down, breathe" signal, his hand pushing down flat. By the third dive I got it. You stop fighting. You let it carry you. If you want to stop and look, you tuck in behind a coral head out of the current. By the end of the week drift diving was my favorite thing in the whole world.

The turtle
Monday morning, dive three, at Tormentos. A hawksbill sea turtle came gliding up out of nowhere and swam along beside us over the coral for about a minute, close enough that I could see the pattern of the plates on its shell, brown and gold like tortoiseshell, which is where tortoiseshell comes from. It looked at me. I swear it looked at me. I forgot to breathe, which you are never supposed to do, and then I remembered the camera.

The eagle rays
Wednesday, at Santa Rosa Wall, two spotted eagle rays came flying along the edge of the wall, below us, flapping slowly like big birds, dark on top with white spots, with long thin tails. They were way too deep for my little camera, so you'll have to take my word. Dad grabbed my arm and pointed and I could hear him yelling through his regulator.

Sharks
Zero. Sorry, Dad. He wanted me to see a nurse shark asleep under a ledge so I'd know they're nothing to be afraid of. I was fine with not knowing.

My dive log

No diving Tuesday afternoon (my ears needed a rest) and only one dive Friday, because you don't fly for a day after diving and we flew home Saturday. The splendid toadfish, by the way, is a fish that lives around Cozumel and pretty much nowhere else. It's flat and stripy with bright yellow fins and it hides under ledges. Juan found it for us.

Dad's advice
He told me three things on the boat before the first dive, and he said them again before every dive after that, and I'm passing them on:

1. Breathe slow. Slow and deep, all the way out. You'll use less air, and you'll stay calm, and calm is everything.
2. Look up now and then. Know where the surface is and where the boat is and where your buddy is. Don't get so busy looking at a fish that you forget the whole ocean.
3. Stay close. Close enough to touch. Always.

The last evening, Friday, on the dock. Juan took it.
Wet hair, sunburned noses, happiest I've ever seen him.

While I was getting certified I kept wishing I could read about somebody else going through it. Since I got back I found one: Scuba Diary: Getting Certified at 45, by Mark Hunley, who got certified in June, with the pool sessions, the quarry dives and his first reef, and a dive log. Reading it was like reading my own diary from March. If you're thinking about learning, read his page and then go do it.

Divers who've dropped in:



E-mail me: [email protected]
Last updated Sunday, September 19, 1999