My mom and dad had been into Scuba diving and when I turned 12 my
sister and I took the certification class together. The class was
made up mainly of young men and forty somethings fulfilling a life
long wish. My sister and I were by far the youngest in the class
which was a bit of a novelty for the other 10 people in class. We had
to learn how to assemble our gear, swim properly, and calculate our
blood gas saturation levels. All of these tasks were not too hard for
me and I was raring to go. Every week we had a one hour theory class
followed by one hour in the local recreation center pool. The pool
time quickly went from unfettered freedom to massive boredom as the
novelty of breathing under water wore off. The only saving graces
were the right to stay up late on school nights and to make fun of
overweight underwater aerobics in the other half of the pool. We called it 'water pig ballet' because we were little jerks. They
were probably turning the corner on a sedentary lifestyle and at
least trying to get some exercise but all we saw were morbidly obese
ladies using milk jugs for resistance doing a dance routine from a
video instructor and it was very funny to my sister and I. After a
few weeks we had to take a theory test which had me really nervous
until I saw it and I was finished in ten minutes. My sister who was
not as good at math failed twice on the same night because she was
unable to calculate her nitrogen saturation and the instructors had
her practice the exact question from the test and try a third time
and she passed. After the practical we had a swimming pool test which
we were both able to pass easily and the fat ladies were not even
there to see how good we did. The last step was our open water
certification and that was going to happen at Bear Lake in couple of
weeks.
