Scuba Virgin In The Red Sea

Diving Into A New Adventure

Sometimes people enter your life at just the right moment.

I’m not comfortable in the water, especially underwater, but Scuba Diving is something I have always wanted to experience even though this would be pushing my boundaries. My cousin who is a marine biologist in Hawaii helped to ease some of my fears and I got myself to a point where I decided I was willing to test the waters, so to speak.

Everything I had seen and heard suggested diving in the Red Sea is among the best in the world, so when I arrived in Sharm El Sheikh during a month-long tour of Egypt I decided that I would look into it.

Luckily I met Amr, a 29-year-old Egyptian diving instructor whose passion is found under the water. He becomes so animated and excited as he talks about the amazing things he has seen under the sea. He told me how he has now moved into the area of photography and videography, capturing some of the spectacular scenery of his underwater encounters with sharks, seals, and giant Manta Rays.

As he spoke I found my fears dissolving, replaced with a fascination to see what has inspired so much passion.

It turned out that he works at Ocean College, the same diving school that I had been considering, rated number 1 or 2 in any of the online rankings. Unfortunately, he was off work because of a sinus infection (a dangerous thing for a diver), but still, I decided that I would sign up for the Discover Scuba Diving PADI course, a one-day introduction that focuses on the basics. Amr walked me through the things they would teach and how they would introduce me to the water. It was all very reassuring so I decided I would sign up and hopefully get over my fear of being underwater.

When I arrived at the dive center I was still more than a little nervous. I was put into a group of 7 people, 5 of them from England who were feeling more confident than me (a couple of them had tried the Discover Scuba Diving course before) and one young man from Jordan who was even more nervous than I was.

We went through the basic instructions, how to clear your regulator, how to clear water from your mask, how to inflate your vest to rise to the surface, and how to deflate it to dive down, as well as the hand signals for okay, problem, etc. We also filled out the forms giving us medical clearance but still clearing the dive school of any responsibility if something went wrong. Yikes!

Then it was time to get suited up. I had worn a shorty wetsuit before so I knew how to get into the suit, the boots, and the goggles. Then they strapped on the weights (about 8kg for me but they added 2kg more in the water) which would reduce our buoyancy and make it easier to go down in the water, and finally, they hooked us up to the tanks and equipment. When it was time to stand up it was like my weight had doubled and carrying all that extra weight made walking a chore. We slowly made our way into the water and then sat down so that our heads were just below the surface. That’s where we started to breathe underwater.

At first, it seemed easy. I remembered everything Amr had told me, relax and just breathe normally, do not hold your breath. I was doing fine, and then we went down a little lower and knelt on the bottom. But at that point, I couldn’t seem to stabilize myself and kept drifting around. The instructors made us test our equipment, taking our regulators out of our mouths and then putting them back in so we could clear the water from it. I obviously was doing it wrong, releasing too much pressure, and water kept going inside my mask and up my nose. I shot to the surface coughing and sputtering and my guide reassured me that it was okay and showed me again how to clear it out underwater. I went down again, and the same thing happened again so I shot to the surface.

The instructor was losing patience, telling me just to relax, and that a little water up the nose wouldn’t kill me. He told me to just relax and go down again. I said “just let me catch my breath for a second” I was still coughing and trying to clear the water from my nose. When I felt okay again, down I went and this time I got it right. I managed to clear the regulator and clear my mask without getting panicky. Still, my breathing was not quite right, I was taking big, quick breaths instead of slow and steady ones, and it took me a little more practice before I felt comfortable enough to move on.

We started to swim around a small area, not far from shore, floating up and over coral that was teaming with fish of every kind. It was very beautiful but I was still trying to remember everything I was supposed to do and not do. My ears started to hurt from the pressure and the simple task of blowing through my pinched nose wasn’t working so the instructor told me to move my head from side to side when I was doing it… I started bopping around like a headbanger so he put his hand out and told me (all through signs and mimes) to just gently tilt my head from side to side… it worked. It was not the most enjoyable experience with so many things to remember. I had to continue to adjust my breathing as well as control my kicks to stay near the bottom but also to be aware of the coral so I didn’t run into it and destroy anything.

Over the next several minutes of just swimming around with the fish, I managed to relax. The instructor came over and checked our air gauges and his eyes went big when he saw mine (I forgot to keep checking it) and so we started heading back to shore.

I suddenly realized he was right in front of me and sitting up with his head above water so I did the same and discovered we were about 2 meters from the beach. He said my eyes were as big as saucers, but I think that was because I was shocked to realize we were that close to shore. We managed to go down only 8.5 meters and were down there for about 35 minutes. We had gone into the water with 200bars of air and when we came to the surface I only had 10 left while my diving buddy (you swim with a buddy) was at 85. The instructor said it was because I was breathing frantically and I needed to remember to just relax, which he said I managed to do better near the end of the lesson. We trudged up the beach with all of our equipment on (except the fins) and it was like carrying a ton of weights with the buoyancy of the water no longer supporting us. We stripped down and put all of our gear in the cleaning tank and sat down for a bit of a debrief with the instructors.

The instructors told us we were now able to go diving with another instructor to a maximum of 12 meters from a boat if we would like. I want to try this again but I think I might go for the beginner Discover Scuba Diving course one more time, which I did a couple of months later in Eilat, Israel. I did better that time but decided there is a reason I am afraid of being underwater, it’s not natural. From now on I’m going to stick to a snorkel.