A New Experience

In addition to a holiday in Thailand, we were also fortunate enough to be part of a sales incentive trip to the Commores. Once there, I put my name down for the resort course in scuba diving, and found I was the only one. So I had personal lessons with a twenty one year old tanned male with sun-bleached hair, which was all rather lovely.

The theory was easy because Vaughn had talked me through most of it beforehand. However, when I got the gear on and had my first pool session, I thought I wouldn’t be able to do this. It felt so claustrophobic, I started to breathe too quickly and was gripped with irrational panic.

I surfaced, took the regulator out of my mouth, looked at the sky and took a deep breath. Then I put the regulator back in my mouth and gently sank below the water, focusing on slow rhythmic breathing. It worked. I was doing it. I swam along the bottom of the pool and started to enjoy the sound of my breath.

We were ready for my first dive. The reef was fairly close and the sea was calm. There were no unexpected strong currents and visibility was good. No reason to be anxious, but of course I was. As soon as I was in the water I felt that panic rising again. My instructor must have sensed it, because he signalled to me to level off, breathe in, breathe out. In… out…OK. I gave him the thumbs up, and we were diving.

Under the sea there was silence at first. All I could hear was the slow heavy hissing of my breath, sounding like the troubled gasps of a dying man.

We dived deeper where the coral came to life. It crackled as it expanded and contracted. Green and yellow parrot fish scratched at the coral with their beaky mouths, causing a crunchy sound.

We saw a red and white striped devil firefish, with strange feather-like dorsal fins and white-tipped wings. We swam through shoals of wrasse and butterfly fish, their iridescence enticing us to play with them. A shy moray poked his head out from under a rock and opened his mouth in a sly smile.

It seemed no time at all before my instructor signalled that it was time to make our slow ascent. I had been down for almost an hour and had been so captivated by the sights that I hadn’t had to think about my breathing at all.