May 14: BFF Breathing

We just started this scuba diving thing and we both love it already. After only two lessons. Some scuba schools do it a little different than ours, I guess, but we had two classes just in the pool. Then next week, we're going way out in the open ocean. That might feel seriously scary!

It was scary enough this week. Listen to what we had to do: our instructor calls it "buddy breathing." It's like at first we're just under the water, swimming around with all our equipment on and having fun and kind of goofing with each other. But then everyone has to get a buddy, so I swim over to Juliette. Then one of us has to get rid of the regulator that we use to breathe, you know, take it out of our mouth. Then we share one regulator by breathing with our buddy. So there's Juliette and me, total BFFs, and we're completely under the water about 8 feet deep now. And we're taking turns passing just this one regulator back and forth, back and forth so we don't drown right there in front of everybody. It seemed like we did this for an hour. But really it was only maybe one minute or so, I think.

Then you know what else we had to do? Each of us had to take off all our scuba equipment while breathing from our own regulator and then lay all that equipment on the bottom of the pool. There's my fins and my air tank and everything else. Just laying there. I even had to take off my mask, which of course means things looked pretty blurry. Then I had to put it all back on and clear my mask so I could see again. It's all just part of the training.

It's funny to clear your mask under the water. I feel like a dolphin or a whale or something, blowing bubbles through my nose. The air I blow out pushes the water from my mask so I can see again. Pretty cool, right? BTW - I really, really want to say that scuba diving is just like the best. Juliette thinks so too. So you should try it if you can. Or maybe at least go snorkeling, where you only use a mask and fins and a snorkel. LOL, that's such a funny word! Snorkel!

Either way, scuba diving or snorkeling, you just feel so free and happy in the water. It's way different than anything I've ever tried, you know? But now it's really time to put myself to the big test. Because it's one thing to jump into a nice safe swimming pool. But it's something different to jump into the ocean - the huge, gigantic, endless ocean with all the fish and the coral and the ships everywhere.

It should be quite the experience, don't you think? But I know I can handle it and so can Juliette! That's why we do all that practice in the pool first and try all these weird things. Like our "BFF breathing," as Juliette and I call the buddy breathing thing we did. ROFL. I don't know why, but we both think that's so funny! Come back for my new blog next week and see what happens to us in the ocean. I hope we're still laughing after that!! :-)