Monday, October 26, 2009



We had such an awesome weekend! It started with a little road trip down to Monterey. At about 8:00am, we showed up at Mcabees Beach to go on our first ocean dives in order to get scuba certified. It was foggy and cold, a typical Monterey morning. On top of that, we were all very tired because we stayed up late the night before trying to get our scuba tests done in time, such procrastinators. The first dive was a little snorkel dive. After getting all suited up, we walked down to the beach and snorkeled out into the cold, cloudy water. Our instructor asked us to dive down and touch the bottom. I looked down, then back up and replied, but I don't see the bottom. He kind of made fun of me. I sucked it up and dove down. It wasn't so bad. We swam in, got our tanks and went back in. we dropped down onto a soft little patch of sand and practiced clearing our masks. in the pool it is a piece of cake. But when that cold water rushes onto your face, your nose does not want to work. I tried really hard to blow, but my instinct fought me the whole way. I got it done though. It really wasn't hard. We cruised around and saw some cool stuff, nudebranks, different kinds of crabs, some pretty big fish, sea stars, sun stars, and lots of different little snails. It was beautiful. But the visibility wasn't that clear. We went on one more dive that day. By that time I was feeling good. Saturday night we went out to dinner, and then talked a bunch of the people in our group to go roller skating at the roller rink. This was pretty funny, seeing our instructors out there doing the hokey pokey on skates. We got a little motel room in Marina, stayed the night and suited up for our Sunday dives. We went to the break water this time. The visibility was better. On top of that there was a little momma sea otter swimming around with her baby on her belly. This was a good spot. We worked on some navigation. Then we had one final dive where we went out by ourselves. It was really cool, having Morgan, Emilia ( Morgan's sister), and Christel, (Morgan's brother's girlfriend) out there all diving together. It was cool because we made up a little dive plan. We started on the break wall, made our way across the sand, and then hung out in the kelp Forrest for a little while, which was totally beautiful. After diving, we got our little temporary certificates, loaded up the car, and headed up to Oakland so that Christel and I could tryout for roller derby. That tryout kicked my butt, especially after diving earlier that day. But it was so fun. We know if we made the team tomorrow. And that was that.