Airlie Beach - Diving Certification

11/6/07 - 11/8/07

These 3 days we became PADI Open Water Scuba Certified! We rock! It was fun but also a lot of work. We didn't get to take pictures until the last day because a lot of the time we were underwater the first 2 days, we had to do skills that they taught us, like taking off your mask underwater (I hated that), taking out the regulator and using someone else's, taking off our BCDs (Buoyancy Control Device - basically the vest that goes around your chest) underwater and putting them back on - so hard because the air tank wants to float away!, learning how to control our bouyancy through breathing in and out - very cool, etc. Every day we came home so beat, we went to bed so early and didn't do anything. Anyway, here are the pictures we took on the last day, but a lot of them aren't very crisp because the visibility wasn't great and we are still figuring out the best settings for taking pictures underwater, where the deeper you go, the more color you lose (you lose red first) (so Jerry, if you can figure out the right settings we should use, that would be great! :) ) Plus, the fish don't always cooperate - why don't they stay still when you are trying to take their picture?!?! We took a couple of videos, but we haven't been able to successfully upload videos here, so we'll have to figure that out later and the pictures will have to be good enough for now :)



We had a pretty large group of people with us. There was a German guy from Munich and a guy from Switzerland, both of whom were very annoying because they kept running into us underwater and kept doing things wrong. The Swiss guy was especially annoying (I think he was like 16 or something). Surprisingly, he didn't understand English very well, and he also didn't seem mature enough to take all this seriously. There was an Irish girl named Orla in our group too who lives in Brisbane now (she came to Australia for a year long trip with some girlfriends 3 years ago and ended up staying here by herself!) and she was really cool. We actually had her over to the apartment to hang out and have dinner the last night of the certification. She goes back to Brisbane on Saturday, but we got her email address to stay in touch, so that was cool.

Our instructors and the other people on the boat were cool. There was one guy named Tom who is English and just helps out on the boat as an Advanced Scuba Diver. It seems like a lot of Europeans move to Australia, and a lot of Australians move here to Airlie Beach because it's so beautiful and fun, but we definitely couldn't live here. It's too small and just caters to tourists. I definitely don't want to live in a place whose sole purpose is tourism. But it's too bad that we don't have any place as beautiful to visit in the U.S. on the East coast. Oh well.

On our last day, there was an American girl going through the first day of the course and she just graduated from Wake Forest, so we talked some smack about football. If I remember correctly, Tech plays Wake this weekend! Man, we wish we could get college football on tv here. We actually saw NFL on ESPN earlier this week, but we really doubt they will play college football, but we're going to check anyway.

So far we haven't really met anyone to hang out with, but that's probably because we haven't been going out at all and we've been going to sleep so early :) We are going to go deep sea fishing next week and we plan on signing up for some diving trips for next week too, so maybe we'll meet someone we want to hang out with on one of those trips. It was nice to have Orla over last night and talk with her about stuff. But it's also been nice to just relax in our apartment, which is so much different than being trapped in a hotel room. It's such a different feel. Well, that's all for now. We'll write more in a few days. We miss you all!