I love being in the water and I love nature. I had already been (and really enjoyed) snorkeling so by extension, I really wanted to try scuba diving. However, living in Ontario, Canada didn't lend me many opportunities. And although it was something I had wanted to try, it just never seemed that accessible - it didn't seem like something that the average Joe did. So I never really planned for it - and it definitely never occurred to me that it would be something I would do more than a handful of times. How things have changed...
My first ever dive experience was during a family trip to Phuket, Thailand in August 2006. Diving wasn't originally on the radar, but when it came up as one of the optional activities for the tour that we were on, my two brothers Ronald and Bennet, my girlfriend Maggie (now my wife), and I all jumped at the opportunity. I don't remember the obligatory pool session being too difficult. After which we were assigned an instructor/divemaster for each pair for the intro shore dive.
Even back then, Ronald had an underwater housing for his point and shoot camera. It was a Sony DSC-W70. I know the model because I had to replace it after flooding it on a later trip. I had forgot to put the o-ring back on the housing after taking it out to clean the night before. I know, brilliant. All the effort to clean the housing and the o-ring to prevent it from flooding - only to completely forget to put it back on... the irony. Anyway, the housing was only rated for 10 ft and we weren't sure how deep we would dive, so we never used it. It was our first dive so we had no perspective on depth but I seem to recall the one other guy from our tour use a disposable waterproof camera on his intro dive without problem. Ah well...
I can still remember some details from that dive. From a marine life perspective, I remember seeing a lot of clown fish swimming in and out of and hiding within anemone - just like in the beginning sequences of Finding Nemo. That was really cool. I haven't seen any clown fish since. I also remember that our tour guide made fun of us for spending all our dive time playing with Nemo. Apparently, she had waded into the water at one point and tapped our heads to get our attention. Neither me nor Maggie noticed this, but that's a pretty good indicator of how deep we went.
From a diving perspective, I remember all we had to do was breathe. The instructor told us to ignore the BCD inflator and that he would control it for us. Knowing what I know now, I can't see how that made any sense - maybe because it was a shore dive and we never went below 10 ft. Either way, I remember feeling it was a struggle to keep myself from floating to the surface. I didn't think too much of it though - I was too focused on watching real-life Nemo!
Although this was technically my first ever dive, I've never really considered it a real dive. Other than having to breath through a regulator, we didn't really "dive".
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