“I didn’t want to dive, I was just fine staying on the boat. Ben [husband] had finished school and his pool certification to dive and we flew into Cabo San Lucas for a vacation. When we got on the boat, that’s where he was going to finish his open water certification for diving, they just give you a little slip and you take it to the dive shop and give it to a dive master and they take you out and certify you to do recreational diving in open water.
So I was just on the boat with them, but I could see them because you only do like 30 feet when you do your certification. I could see him and I was watching him and I thought, ‘I really want to do that’. But he had to go to school for five weeks to do his pool work. So when they come back up I talked to the dive master and he said, ‘Oh I can [certify] you in three days. You take this book home to study it, I’ll give you the written test and we’ll do the pool work and then I’ll certify you on the third day’.
I took the book back to the hotel room, studied and then the next day I did the written test and then he took me to the trailer park where he lived and had me do all the pool work in the pool there. The next day we went out on the boat. To certify you have a compass on your arm and you have to swim out like 200 yards and swim back following the compass. Then you have to go down and sit on the bottom of the ocean floor, take all your gear off and put it back on, and so on. I got it all done, certified and he signed me off.
When we walked into the pool area of the hotel that was owned by locals they had great big tables all laid out with food and everybody was out there and they started cheering me on because I had passed my diver’s certificate in three days. They had seen me studying by the pool for three days, reading and reading, so they had a big party for me and the restaurant had furnished all the finger food kind of stuff and all the drinks and we had a party because I did my diving test.
Then we dove like everyday, the rest of the time we were there. Diving is awesome, it’s a whole different world, you know, it’s a world of quiet, it’s interesting, there’s no phone, no tv, nobody can talk to you. You know it’s just, awe.”
