Slideshow « Vietnam Trip, Day 11 | Cham Island and My First Scuba Diving Experience

Wow, that was quite a day! At 8 a.m. I was picked up for my first scuba diving experience, something I actually wanted to do for a very long time. The last time I tried to go scuba diving was when I was about 13 or 14, but the diving school did not let me due to my age. Arriving at the Hoi An pier, we took a 1-hour boat ride to Cham Island. During the boat ride we got first instructions on how to breathe, equalize our ears, and more importantly, what to do in case of emergencies – not that I was worried of course. One of the instructors explained that most people have problems equalizing the pressure in their ears when descending to deeper depths. If you can’t equalize your ears then you cannot or should not continue the descend or otherwise your ear drums could poop.

Once we arrived at the island, we put our gear on and jumped in the water. Right from the start I had trouble staying afloat. Normally what you do is inflate your vest, which I immediately did after jumping in the water. But for some odd reason I was struggling to stay above the water. Remember, without some air in your vest to compensate for the heavy equipment you have on, you go down like a rock – really fast. I then noticed some air bubbles coming out of my vest. Was this normal? Was this something I should be alarmed about? So I was flapping my fins quite hard at which point I told one of the instructors about my problem. He said it was fine and I had nothing to worry about. After a few minutes nothing changed, so I asked another dive instructor to take a look at my vest. He did and told me to go back to the boat right away and put on some new gear, because I had a leak in my vest that was draining my air supply. Oh great, I thought, what a fantastic start. I was just glad I was persistant and realized the problem before we hit depths of 12-18 meters.

Returning to the group, we started our dive in the shallow waters and did a few exercises such as reaching for our air intake, clearing our masks of water and communicating in sign language. Before we knew it, we were finally under water. I looked at my gauge and read 3 meters, 5 meters,…man this was blast! I luckily didn’t have any problems with equalizing the pressure in my ears. We continued our dive to about 12-14 meters and before we knew it, it was all over. In total we spent about 45 minutes under water, which seemed like 10 minutes. Reaching the surface I knew I was infected! The diving bug has bitten me.

Despite the limited visibility under water, my first scuba diving lesson was a fantastic experience. I’m sure I want to continue with scuba diving, either with a PADI open water license or a NAUI license (NAUI courses are often considered of better quality, as they are a non-profit organization, unlike PADI that is a profit-oriented organization) once I get the next chance.

After scuba diving some of us went to another island and engaged in a little snorkeling and chilled out in the hammocks afterwards. At around 4 p.m. it was time to go back to Hoi An and from there to the Da Nang airport to catch my flight to Ho Chi Minh City (a.k.a. Saigon).