One thing I promised my parents before I left was that I wouldn’t do anything life threatening unless I had friends around who I would trust to get me to the hospital.

So, now that I have friends it was time to go diving.

Yesterday we got the instructions: press this button to go down, this button inflates your buoyancy device, if you need to clear your mask send a big puff of air through your nose, and above all, on the way down, constantly equalize your ears (we work in TV, this was a lot to remember for our pop culture brains). 

We practiced in the pool, turning a sparkling blue pool into one filled with three eel like substances wearing gear and slithering around on the bottom. 

This morning we had our dive, we sat in the boat, and added on our weights (about 10lbs), our jackets and our tank (so heavy), and then we had to sit on the edge and flip ourselves overboard. We did not practice this in the pool – trying to get your brain to do something that logically results in, “head hits boat, blood everywhere, sharks come to clean up the mess on aisle 3” is difficult. 

Eventually we were in the water, climbing our way down a rope, equalizing our ears by shaking our heads and squeezing our noses…and then we were diving! And then we saw a turtle! It was pretty magical. 

We glided along, at one point 11m down (where we saw the turtle), came up and immediately asked “can we go again?”