Journey to the bottom of the salty sea - guest post by Iany

It might surprise those aware of my past as a pirate, to learn of my fear for the salty sea. But if my feet couldn't touch the bottom, I tended to panic a bit.
That all changed today however with my first scuba dive.
I wanted to use the fact that I was recovering from a vicious and unprovoked attack from a jelly fish about the size of a house as a get out, but I had to redeem myself after wussing out of the boomerang in Aqualand.

So we preceeded silently to the dive centre, where we were greeted by Olivier our instructor, who in soothing tones explained about bursting lungs, poisenous fish and all the joys of the deep.
He did however seem like a safe pair of hands and I felt our chances of survival improve to about 90%. After Olivier talked us through the process of diving we were given our flippers, our wet suits and our gas tanks with floatation jackets (all of which weighs 20 KGs!!)
He showed us how to breathe and how to inflate and deflate the jacket to rise and sink into the water. He also explained all the important hand signals for "is everything ok?", "how much air is left in your tank?" or the thumb up signal for "GET ME OUT FAST!"
We both looked like hot mommas in our wet suits. for sure. Although I think I looked like a sock full of potatoes.
We waddled into the sea and put on our flippers. At this point I was definitely shitting myself because I knew I had reached the point of no return.
We put in our breathing mouth piece thingy (the technicalities are really important) and followed Olivier into the depth of the salty sea.
The feeling of being submerged is the most incredible weightless exciting bizarre sensation in the world.

We got the hang of it pretty quick although at one stage Lil was humping the instructor's leg. He took us down deeper and deeper and it was at 11 metres when we all turned unto our backs and looked up to the surface that I realised how deep we actually were.
Totally amazing. We saw some nice fishies too. I like fishies.

At that moment, my fear of deep water disappeared, well sort of. I am still afraid of what's in the water; jelly fish, sting rays, electric eels, sharks, killer whales, giant squid, Sea Grisslies..................