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!

When I left our story, I was starting to feel ill with an hour left on the boat. I didn’t feel better when the hour was up, but someone said (and I knew) that I’d feel better in the water — there’s usually very little rocking motion when you’re diving. The mom of the family had said she felt better after vomiting, so I gave that a try over the back of the boat. My stomach heaved a couple times, and I felt better for about a minute in between, but found no lasting relief.

We got in the water, and I felt much worse bobbing on the surface. I was patiently waiting for the signal to go down, but there was some hold-up and I was feeling worse by the second. Thankfully, we went under and I did feel better. I took a bunch of photos, which you will see in a second, with the same caveat as the last bunch — first time doing any serious underwater editing, I like them, but they aren’t “true to colour”, really.

Before I get to the story, here’s a video of bubbles coming from the ground:

Before we got in the water, I asked about the protocol for if you need to vomit while diving. You keep your regulator (the thing you breath through) in your mouth. They said that your first reaction upon finishing vomiting, is to breath in, so you need something to breath in using. The regulator is designed to clear the vomit from itself. I didn’t think I’d need to know this – I’d just tried and failed 4 times on the edge the boat, I didn’t think I’d need it in calmer waters.

About half way through the dive Jake swam up to me with a squid in-hand. Here’s a video:

I don’t even know where it came from, but as this squid is blowing out his black ink, my stomach decides it’s had enough and I vomit into my regulator, in 60 feet of water.

It’s important to note, that it is not at all safe to just swim to the surface to deal with emergencies. From the last post, the nitrogen needs time to leave your body and if you suddenly rise up from 60 feet down because of an emergency, or because you think you have an emergency, you could end up with a worse problem than when you started. You’ve likely heard of “the bends”, and it’s when nitrogen bubbles in your blood suddenly get large, in your blood.

So as much as I might have wanted to, I had to manage this problem and maintain calm while my stomach was convulsing, where I was. I finished vomiting and tried to take a breath. But the first thing I felt was liquid coming back in. That was frightening – trying to take a breath, but finding only liquid. 2 things helped – 1, that the dive master was literally 1 foot in front of me so if I actually needed help, it was right there, and 2, knowledge that if I blew out of the regulator it would probably be better. So I took the last of my breath, blew out as hard as I could, and took a breath, hoping that it would be air. It was, and I took a couple regular breaths to make sure everything was ok.

But now my mouth tasted like vomit…I took a breath, pulled the reg out and while breathing out (never hold your breath) swooshed some sea water around my mouth, and put the reg back in.

I finished out the dive, and surfaced and got back on the boat and had a moment where Jake and I were telling this story from both of our points of view. Because he was just floating there holding a squid spouting ink while watching me lose my breakfast!

Back on the boat, I didn’t feel much better. I had some water and vomited again off the back of the boat. I briefly considered not going on the third dive I had planned, but again figured I’d be happier in the water than not.

We only had a half hour surface interval (as they are called) this time, so we boated off to our next location. I sat on the edge of the boat and tried to watch the island, with all of it’s glorious “not moving”. I regretted not being able to have a conversation with the family, but it was all I could do to focus on the land and hope I didn’t get worse. >.<

More of the story in a bit!

I changed my mind. I’m not doing any video editing besides cropping, so they are super easy to share. It’s not really this blue down there, but it’s more blue than the photos from earlier. Your eyes and mind adjust a bit as the red is sucked out of the light by the amount of water between you and the sun. But the fish are this yellow!

The last one needs a little explanation. I was doing my 3 minute safety stop at 15 feet. Because I was diving Nitrox, I had more time at depth than the others, so I took my time coming up. So I was hanging out at 15 feet watching them and the fish and the boat and I saw the boat almost jump it’s front out of the water and slam back down again. I quickly pulled my camera up to take a video, but it didn’t happen again while I was there. Still, pretty rough water in my, and my stomaches, opinion. 🙂

I have now so many photos of diving that I have to split them into multiple parts. I also have a ton of stories from this day. But at least I can type faster and better than I can photo edit.

I’ve done a ton of editing on these photos to try to put some colour in them, where there was previously only one colour — blue. I think they look really cool, but they don’t necessarily look the way the world looks at 107 feet, regardless of whether your viewing apparatus is a several hundred million year old sphere of goo, or a comparatively recent compressed plate of electronics.

I spent all night editing that first photo, and then copied the editing profile to the rest. And then facepalmed when a yellow fish entered the photo, because the yellow fish turned blue. Damn him.

I woke again at 5am, and McDonalds was actually open. It was an easy drive to the dive shop, since I’ve done it a few times now. They had my dive watch hanging behind the counter, and the dive master Jake was good enough to both believe me when I said it was mine (no one who knew for sure was there to corroborate my story!) and replace the battery in it (it hadn’t worked on my first day) and help me figure out how to set it to Nitrox mode.

Nitrox is a mixture of air in your tank that, in this case, contains 32% oxygen, instead of the regular mix of 21% oxygen. This sounds super good – more oxygen is more better, right? Except that oxygen is super corrosive and can really mess you up, particularly when it’s compressed into a tiny tank and then brought down 100 feet, increasing it’s pressure by about 4 times. I dive Nitrox because I feel better when I do so, but I had to take a course to be allowed to do so.

I don’t think I’d written – I had lost the hand pump for my camera housing last week. The housing uses a vacuum to keep the water safely away from my expensive camera, which requires the pump to create the vacuum. I bought this housing because of this feature, because I’ve lost to many electronics to water on vacations and I refuse to learn the obvious lesson. 😛 Replacing the pump is $40, and a bunch of time – ie, I wouldn’t be using it on this trip. The dive guys had looked all over for it, and I had looked all over for it at home and I drove down this morning hoping it would be somewhere they hadn’t looked.

The story ends happily — I showed Jake a photo of it, and he recommended I show Noah, the boat captain. While I was doing so, Lauren, the dive guide held up her hand and said “You mean this?” and I yelled in excitement — “THAT!” This morning was coming up aces!

With all of my garbage (and some paperwork) dealt with, I started talking with my fellow divers. Last week it had been a boat full of loners – 5 people who were there by themselves, which is easy to talk with. Sometimes you get boats with 2 couples and myself, and that’s harder — the couples tend to talk with themselves and then I’m just alone. This morning I was joined by a family of 4! A mom, dad, and their two kids – I think they were about 16 and 19. They were a blast to hang out with! And an inspiration for my little family — they told me that the dad had encouraged the family to get into a variety of adventure activities, and so now they all skied and dove together. I’ve got a lot of years, but I hope Ava will dive with me. 😀

We had a good boat trip to the first dive site – the Corsair! I had been wanting to see this wreck last week, but because the conditions were so rough we had to skip it. Today it was still a little rough, but not so much we had to go somewhere else. It’s a WWII plane that ran out of fuel and had to be abandoned, and today is one of the most popular dive sites in Oahu.

I think my photos speak for the dive itself – it was amazing. The coral dives you tend to follow the dive master in a path around a landscape that would be impossible to memorize without doing it a lot. But the wreck is sitting in an area of sand with nothing else around, and you just circle it and circle it and circle it until you run out of time. On the one hand, you see less. On the other hand, what you see is amazing! I love seeing the gubbins behind the propeller and the schools of fish just chilling out in the plane casing.

We did two safety stops on the way up. Because of build-up of nitrogen in your blood, dive safety requires that you go up slowly to allow your body to off-gas the nitrogen. It’s also good form when you go deep (100 feet is pretty deep — 120 is my certification limit) to have a little stop at half-way up to pause for 3 minutes, followed by the required stop at 15 feet for 3 minutes.

We all got back on the boat and began chattering about how amazing the dive was! We had an hour to wait before the next dive, again to allow our bodies time to recover from the dive, so snacks and water were passed out. This is where the trouble began. Myself and the mother started to feel very sick. The rest of my story is unfortunate, but also funny-after-the-fact, and I’ll leave it for the next post.

I’ve got some videos for this dive that I’m going to post separately, as I want to finish photo editing!