One intense way to learn a diving lesson

Turned out I had such a good time diving despite the strong current, I decided to take advantage of a few more days in Cozumel and sign up for an additional day of diving, even though Brice didn’t want to go.

I was a little nervous at first, going solo, being paired up with an Israeli couple who were seriously experienced divers, and just because I’m often nervous when diving. But I decided to try my best to enjoy the day.

Dive 1 was in the Palancar Caves, a stunning stretch of coral that has large columns. The depth to the right was only 30m or so, but if you looked left it was a steep drop to dark blue, about 150m deep! I kept my eyes to the right 😂

We spotted tons of little fish, a few sting rays and then a giant green Moray Eel, about 6 feet long, swimming along!

Right as I was thinking how amazing the dive was and how happy I was that I decided to go, my weight belt slipped off. It was like slow motion seeing it drop down to the sand below, another 5-10m below where I was. Before I even knew what to do next, I started floating up. Clearly even just 6kg in extra weight makes a difference!

Fortunately the experienced diver saw what happened and grabbed me, trying to keep me from floating to the surface. I flailed, trying to get our divemaster’s attention. That’s the hard - and scary - part of diving, you can’t just scream out and explain what’s wrong. Apparently my flailing and pointing at my weights on the ocean floor just looked like I was excited about a fish, because by the time the instructor just stared at me. The Israeli guy tried his best but my buoyancy just kept going up, and suddenly we were at the surface. Given his experience, he knew exactly what to do - quickly inflated by BCD so I would stay afloat, held up his inflatable flag to notify the nearby boat, told me it was all ok.

Once we got on board the boat, I got a bit freaked out, nervous of decompression issues going up so quickly, the adrenaline coming down and just rehashing the whole situation in my mind. The Israeli guy, my instructor and other guides on the boat all said it was no problem- we weren’t deep or down long enough for any issues. Phew, that was certainly good at least.

In all the discussions after, despite it being a faulty weight belt that shouldn’t have slipped off so easily, it was definitely a lesson in what to do in that situation. How to get attention, what to do, etc.

But man is it a scary aspect of diving, where you can’t express what is wrong and so much can feel out of your control.

Makes me not excited to dive more, but then at the same time, wow it was beautiful under that. And I’m almost most upset that we had to cut our dive short because of the fiasco. So maybe I won’t stop diving just yet? 🤷🏻‍♀️Read more