A fantasy realized

Over a year ago, I went to Thailand. Remember that?

One of the things we did there, was snorkel. It was a most amazing experience because there were so many fish. I was frustrated by the fact that the fish could swim down, and I couldn't. I wanted to see where they were going, and the undisturbed places under rocks.

A couple months ago, when I was thinking... what do *I* want to do? I decided to get certified to scuba dive.

Today, I finished my Advanced Open Water diver certification.
I got my Open Water a couple months ago, but that only resulted in a couple dives, and not necessarily confidence. Its taken a long time to do the AOW dives because of my travel schedule and circumstances.

We did the following specialties: underwater naturalist, deep dive, night dive, peak-performance buoyancy, and navigation. We tried to do the navigation last week, but the waves were too rough, so finished that up today at the Casino Point dive park on Catalina Island.

I've been diving at Casino Point once before, but today was great!
We saw a 4 foot Sheephead called Oscar, a baby bat ray, tons of Garibaldi, bass, and gobi's... and two fricking HUGE black seabass... these things must have been over 6 feet long, and weighing over 300 pounds each... HUGE!

The most amazing thing about today, is I finally got to a place where I knew what to do, I knew I knew, and it all came naturally. I felt like a diver, not a student. I went up, down, I looked up, I looked down, I hovered around... my buddy kept playing jokes... banging into me like a cat, playing peekaboo around kelp, and we were just being silly.

It is such a feeling of freedom. A fantasy realized.

Bring on the WARM WATER!