An old, new world

We're about a month and a half into our first semester of Three Seas and so far it has been a lot of hard work but so much fun. The other day I was talking with some of my peers about how they were feeling about open water diving compared to their previous experience in aquariums and I thought I should share. Everyone seemed to have different aquarium experiences whether it was a hookah system (hookah diving systems have a compressor at the surface that delivers air to divers below through long hoses and a demand regulator similar to the kind used in scuba), to the animals they fed, the crazy incidents in front of guests, aquarium romances, and so on. One thing that was the same for all of us though was that we thought we would be rock stars in our Research Diving Methods class because we had 50-500 + dives. We have all been humbled at some point now. Going from a controlled environment with "domesticated" animals that swim right up to you to the open ocean really opened my eyes again to what being a good diver means.


This doesn't mean that we aren't enjoying it; on the contrary, we're having a great time. We are re-learning old skills and some new ones during this semester like CPR, filling scuba tanks, attaining neutral buoyancy, how to be a good scientific diver, etc. We've been tagging kelp for growth labs and surveying benthic mobile invertebrates for density analyses with transects and "T" bars and collecting algae for botany projects. It's similar to terrestrial surveys except that you have to be mindful of many other factors like your dive buddy, your air, your buoyancy, your equipment for your scientific purpose, etc. This is no easy task on top of currents and other oceanographic processes but so far everyone is doing a great job and having a good time. I love underwater photography and try to take my camera on dives for when I see something that I don't know about so I can identify it later. We also spend a day working with underwater photography and video. When we hit our 12th dive (next week), we will all be AAUS Scientific Divers! I look forward to more diving adventures and being able to say, "I am a scientific diver." (Which also means we can legally play with the sea critters).