My Experience Learning Diving
Im writing this post to share on my experience diving, and let others know what to expect. I signed up for the PADI advanced open water course at a dive center in Terengganu with my brother and aunt. My aunt is a more experienced diver and she went there to get her rescue diver and side mount specialisation. While I immediately went for my advanced open water, I recommend you just do the open water or a tryout first, incase you don’t like diving and spend a grand on a cert you will never use. For our diving days, we did three dives each day.
On the first day, we settled into our lodging, which was inside the dive center. We stayed in the same house as the instructors. There were some stray cats around that were quite friendly. I was excited to begin diving. I had even bought a 700$ action camera to capture the underwater scenes.
Our training started the next day in the swimming pool. Our instructor KJ showed us the dive equipment and how to wear it. It was quite simple and there were not much activities to learn. We finished in about 2-3 hours.
The next day was the real dive. We took a boat 45 minutes out east of the jetty to Bidong island. There were many corals and fishes there, and some sculptures left for divers to see. We did the rollback technique to fall into the water, however I forgot to lift my legs up and scraped the underside of my left leg. Luckily it was fine but it was a little painful. For rollback technique, the three things to remember (according to me) are lean back into the water and keep your legs infront of your body, hold your mask firmly, and breathe out of your regulator while falling in so that you dont drink seawater. My first descent was a really uncomfortable experience. As I descended, I kept feeling like I was out of air because I wasn’t used to not breathing through my nose. I also drank seawater and I couldn’t get rid of the seawater taste so I thought there was still seawater in my mouth. I panicked and swam back up for air. After my instructor followed me up, we went back down. The whole time, I kept thinking, “When is this ending?”. I felt extremely cold, I only had a rash guard and swimming trunks on and after coming up I had a massive headache. The dive after the surface interval and lunch were similar, with painful headaches and feeling like I was getting hypothermia. My diving fins also were too small for my feet and they gave me painful blisters. So my first day diving, I hated it.
The second day, I borrowed a 1.5mm short sleeve wetsuit from the dive center, and got better fins which fit much more comfortably. However, later when diving I still felt extremely cold. On the 2nd dive, I started shivering as soon as I got into the water. Later into that dive, the cold became extremely unbearable. When I got out of the water, my face was completely white and I had another horrible headache. I wondered how anyone could enjoy or even pay to do this torturous activity.
The next day was the final day of diving. We were supposed to have four days of diving, however we had booked our flight on the fourth diving day. We had to forfeit that day because of the 18 hour no dive limit. On this final day of diving. I wore both my rashguard, swimming trunks and wet suit over. During the dive, I kept my hands close to my body, having my arms folded the entire time to reduce heat loss. I also had gotten the hang of controlling buoyancy. I was able to enjoy the dive significantly better. There were also so many fish on the third day, with these yellow finned fish circling us the entire time on our third dive.
Overall, learning to dive was a very uncomfortable experience, because it took time for me to adapt to unfmiliar conditions, and also a lack of proper gear. However after adjusting, I enjoyed it a lot.