Scuba

- Today and yesterday went scuba diving.. I thought it was quite fun..
- Spent the first day morning in a lecture on how to use the scuba equipment, adapt your body to the aqueous environment and also the risks involved in scuba diving.. They also included ways and means to blow up your lungs, stomach, intestines, sinuses, eyeballs and ears while suffering a stroke from nitrogen bubbles appearing in your veins. What a nice way to go to hell. Basically, acheiving safety in scuba can be summarised in 3 words. "Don't stop breathing ". Really. This is becuase most scuba sustained injuries are from expansion of gases, which occurs as we rise to the surface after the dive. So if you exhale constantly, the gas in your lungs will not expand
- After lunch, we went to the pool to try what we had learnt.. But first, we had to have a swim test .. You have to be able to swim 200m nonstop, then dive and swim 15~20m in one breath and finally tread water with your head above water at all times for 10 minutes. Got a few pathetic fools dunno how to swim but sign up for scuba. What do you expect ? Floats for scuba ? Anyway the swim test was a complete breeze for me.. Okay the 10 minutes tread was a tad tiring but on the whole it was quite lag.
- First we had to get wet suits and fins of a suitable size... The wet suit was kinda tight and peck lim kept talking about what King Shahamudin from "Kingdom of Heaven", who was also wearing a skin tight suit to battle or something. Then we had to wear the fins, aka flippers.. KFC got a pair of bright hot pink ones. Lol.
- Then we had to get ourselves an air tank.. May I emphasize its an AIR tank, not an oxygen tank. If it was pure oxygen we would all have died of oxygen toxicity. It is dry, compressed air. Its nice and cool and dry so your mouth feels a tad dry after using it for a long time...
- Next is the mask.. You actually have to spit on your mask.. The theory is that the sticky saliva causes all condesation on it to roll off, so your mask doesnt fog up.. Cool huh..
- Yeah. Next we had to learn how to breathe. Yes, I know it sounds very sad but its harder than you think. This is because when we pinch our noses and breathe through our mouths on land, the muscles that make us breathe through our nose are still activated. We just don't notice. However, underwater, you have to consciously make sure that you breathe ONLY through your mouth. Kinda hard for new people cos we're not used to it.
- After learning how to breathe through our mouths we had to learn how to purge water out of our "2nd stages"(the thing you put into your mouth) and our masks.. Basically the 2nd stage is easy to purge cos it already has a purge button built in. For the mask, you would have to depress the top of your mask, tilt your head up and breathe air out of your nose, displacing the water in your mask.
- After that, we started to swim submerged in the pool.. Swim swim swim.. Time passes really quickly in the water.. Got out and washed up and went home..
- Today we had more lecture about more ways you can die in the water. Basically you can be bitten, stung, shocked and stabbed to death by marine creatures. Lol. We had a physics lecture on bouyancy, gas laws and density, a chemistry lesson on effects of gases under compression and bio lesson on the anatomy of the lungs. Ha ha.. Did u know that at a depth of more than 24m you can suffer from nitrogen narcosis. This is when the nitrogen dissolved in your blood under pressure causes narcotic effects on your body and you become "high". Lol.
- Went down to pool. Learnt how to snorkel.. Basically the same except its breathing air out of a tube on the surface of the water. I dun like it.. I prefer scuba over snorkelling.. Ha ha....
- Next, still in snorkel gear, we learnt how to dive on a staionary spot, etc... Quite cool. Learnt a technique to dive 10 feet w/o wasting one bit of energy or moving at all.. Woah. Nice.
- Hurray, soon it was back to scuba gear and revising what we had learnt yesterday.. After some slacking around we tried hovering by acheiving neutral bouyancy and suspending ourselves in mid water.. Cool.
- Then we started to scuba dive around the pool and started to play with a frisbee.. Then we started to throw a plastic torpedo around... Lol.. Quite fun.. Funner than it sounds. Lol.
- Then it was photo taking =) Got quite a few pics of me underwater... I hope they send the picts to me then I'll show you all. la la la..

too much and you wont burst like a balloon on the surface.

"Take some time and think it over and you would probably realise that you have NO life. Got life ?"
~quotez~