Today I dived on an Andaman Island coral reef. John wasn’t feeling well and stayed back at the camp, but our host, Arzu Mistry (photo center) and her colleague, Padmini Nagaraj (photo left), joined me for Padi’s and my first experience scuba diving! It was, well, incredible.

I adore water and will choose to be in it anytime, anywhere, any temperature, salt, fresh, pool, outside, lake, ocean, creek, river, inside, bathtub, you name it. But I’ve never scuba dived. I always assumed I would one day, but I came close to giving that dream up, worried that I’d passed my window for that kind of thing. When I got to the Andamans and met Arzu’s brother, Umeed, who is the Director of the diving program at ANET, we had a conversation. He was so calm and reassuring that diving was possible for me that even Padi, who doesn’t SWIM, was determined to go on a “Discovery” dive with him. Arzu has her Open Water Certificate and has dived many times, so we knew we were in great hands with caring friends.

We learned a couple things in the pool the day before — trying out breathing on the regulator, clearing our masks when water gets into them (which it did when Arzu accidentally slugged me while we were under!), retrieving our breathing regulator should it fall from our mouths, swimming with the flippers and tanks and the inflated life vests on, and so forth. But as they said, all this was “just in case,” and we didn’t really need to know much — the purpose of a Discovery dive is to introduce someone to the possibility of diving by showing them what it’s for without requiring much technical knowledge or preparation. I think that has great parallels to teaching — get the skill out of the way by scaffolding most of what they need to do the process while the student is getting hooked on the enterprise itself. Then bring the skills in, since they’ll understand what they’re for and tolerate any tediousness that comes up in learning them–and, of course, tediousness always comes up in learning new skills.

I went with Umeed first, slowly following Arzu down the descending rope of the boat’s anchor, holding Umeed’s hand and equalizing my ears every couple of feet down to 10 meters. Umeed is, as my friend Louise Music says, “the handsomest man in the world,” so holding his hand was no problem 🙂 But what really made it great is his calm assurance. There was no question in my mind that if I did exactly what this young man told me, I’d be fine and have a wonderful experience. And so I did.

Crocodile Fish

We saw a lot of the same fish and animals we’d seen while snorkeling, although there were new ones. The Christmas Tree worms were a gas — if you touch them they pull back into the coral. But in a few seconds, they pop out, blooming like a tiny jeweled flowers on time-lapse photography.

Christmas Tree Worms

But being down with air felt so different.  Snorkeling let me see the world below, but the scuba gear let me feel like I could live there and wasn’t just a voyeur. Add to that the buoyancy and ease of movement, plus hearing only your own breathing, and it makes the experience blissful on every level. I may be hooked.

Hello from below