After our short surface interval, we got back in the water again. I felt a bit better again as we went down. I got real lazy with editing these photos, to the point where I just stopped doing all the blue correction towards the end. You can tell me which you like better if you like. On the other hand, this dive was at about 40 feet, so it needed less correction than the others.

I didn’t quite catch exactly why our other dive guide was no longer diving, but I think she went over her dive limits on dive #2 so it wasn’t a good idea for her to go again. Instead, she simply free dove to 30 feet. Which is crazy cool – I get to about 15 feet before I start having a little panic attack at how far from air I am!

At about 10 minutes into the dive, I was really cold. At about 20 minutes in, my jaw hurt from holding the reg in to hard. I was still nauseous. And that’s to many problems for me and I decided to get out! I signaled to Jake that I was going to head up, and he pointed me in the direction to go. I slowly swam in that direction – taking control of my destiny made me happy about a slower pace and rose up to 15 feet across a long swim to do my safety stop. I surfaced after finishing it and was a little bit away from the boat, but not a long bit. I went back down to 15 feet where it was easier to swim and got to the boat to grab the line. As I grabbed the line, I held on and vomited into my reg again. Even though I was at the surface and didn’t have to go in the reg, it seemed like a poor idea to bob on the surface and puke on everything. So there I was, for the third time puking and for the second time under water.

I got on the boat and took my wetsuit off and sat with a towel on me at the edge of the boat, very unwell.

The other came back on and we started back to shore. I asked Noah the captain if he could go quickly back, knowing that he would likely not slow-boat it anyway. As we got nearer the harbour and the waves died down, I nearly instantly felt good enough to talk with people and I finally got to socialize about our dives! As we drove into the harbour, I was nearly perfectly healthy.

I think my dive story mostly ends there. I talked with everyone for a bit on the dock, feeling pretty great for the first time in hours, and thanked one of the dive guys for putting up with my shit — I’d sent him 5-7 e-mails over the week about a variety of stupid shit like needing to reschedule or missing my hand pump and dive watch and some other stuff.

I drove home and related my story to Miranda, who had a baby who had napped twice for 3.5 hours total, which is a very rare occurrence at home, let alone here.

And I think that clears my backlog!