Yet another breakthrough

Today, while practicing for an upcoming diving trip to Sipadan (woo-hoo!) I managed another breakthrough, this time for scuba diving.

I learnt to breathe indefinitely with the mask off.

Before today, that was the single most hated thing that I had for scuba diving. Why did I hate it? Becos for the most part, your nose is safely covered under the mask and when you take your mask off, your nose gets exposed and you are prone to sucking water in through your nose.

Do you have any idea how painful that can be, having water rushing into your sinus?

In fact, I went taste of this unpleasant experience early on in diving. Last year while practicing for my first Panasonic marine conservation assignment (practice incidentally was at the same Shah Alam pool), our instructor made us perform a number of skills, one of which was to take off our mask for a few seconds, replace it and clear water from it.

All of us newbies struggled with it. Nobody could do it.

I think it hit me hardest; becos of that one failed skill, I had doubts about my ability to survive diving in the sea and was contemplating pulling out of the assignment. Luckily I did not give in to that fear.

So how did I manage it this time? I decided to believe what the text book says: that it is easy to breathe with the mask off (in the book, they even have a picture of a guy doing that). Pinching my nose at first, I slowly let go of it and started to breathe in a controlled manner. It worked!

Dolphin Lee, my instructor for today, instructed me to swim with the mask off from one end of the pool to the other. That's 50m.

It was a 'wow' moment when I finished that manouevre.