I grew up on the beach, so the water is where I lived as a kid. I was always in it. I would challenge the tide, running from it as it rushed in and then chasing it back down to the waterline the second it pulled out, daring it to turn around and catch me again. I would get so lost in it, the playing and the swimming and the fighting against the current, that the current and I became one thing, and I never noticed it carrying me. I would finally look up and be a hundred yards down the beach from where I started, away from my parents, away from the towel and the umbrella and the pile of beach toys that had been my little home base for those hours. As a kid I wanted to grow up and be one of two things, an astronaut or a scuba diver. Space or the sea. Either way it was the unknown that pulled at me, and the sea always felt closer, more possible, more mine, because I grew up right on the edge of it. I wanted to swim down to sunken ships and find treasure on a pirate wreck. I wanted to see the Great Barrier Reef with my own eyes. So when I found myself with a few free days in Vietnam, in Nha Trang, I knew exactly what I was going to do with them. I was going to become a diver.
Becoming a diver does not start in the water. It starts in the books. I started the online PADI course, the theory and the test you have to pass before anyone will let you near a tank. It took me longer than I expected, because there is far more to it than I thought. You learn what pressure does to your body the deeper you go, why you can never hold your breath and rise, how nitrogen builds up and why you come up slow. You learn to plan your air and to read the early signs of trouble in yourself and in the person beside you. You learn the gear piece by piece: the regulator that turns a steel tank into something you can breathe, the BCD that decides whether you float or sink, the gauges that tell you how deep you are and how much air you have left. And you learn the hand signals, because the second you go under, talking is over. The moment I passed that final exam I was up out of my chair. I was born a water baby. I was ready for this, ready to do this. Three days were in front of me, the first in a pool, the next two out in open water.
The pool day went easy until it did not. The breathing, the drills, the signals, all of it fine. Then came the one test that nearly broke me: take your mask off underwater, keep breathing through the regulator, and put the mask back on. Every single time, I breathed in through my nose, which means I breathed in water, which means I came up coughing it back out. My instructor could not stop laughing at me. And this is what made it so strange. I am a water person. I swim, I know how to time my breath, pressure does not bother my nose, and I am not one of those people who has to pinch their nose to drop underwater. I open my eyes in salt water without a second thought. The more time you spend in the ocean, the more all of that simply stops affecting you. But this one got me. Breathing through the regulator while keeping my nose shut down was the one thing I could not do, and I could not work out why. The only answer I have is that my brain was still running the snorkel program. A snorkel mask sits pressed over your nose the whole time, so for years I had trained myself to ignore my nose and never think about it, and now I needed to control it on purpose, and the wiring would not flip. That was the only thing standing between me and the license. And the strange part is that I did not even mind, because all of this was so new and so exciting that I could not stop smiling. I smiled the whole time, even as I failed that drill over and over. I got through the pool day grinning, looking forward to my first real dive site, because I had never done any of this before. I had never even put on scuba gear. All of it was brand new.
The next morning we went out, and the first thing that hit me was the water itself. It had an aqua-blue color to it that stopped me, the kind I had not seen since I was a kid in West Palm Beach. We rode out on an eighty-five-foot wooden Vietnamese boat, past rock formations and small islands, and it was nothing like the Vietnam you see in the photos or read about. I had gotten used to the rice fields, the busy streets, the thousand-year-old pagodas. This was a different kind of beauty entirely, and more than that, it was mine. I grew up on the water. I know how it looks and how it moves. For the first time on the whole trip, I was in my element.
Then I geared up for real: the full wetsuit, the tank on my back, the weight belt around my waist, and the BCD, the inflatable vest that controls your buoyancy, with the inflator you press to rise or sink. Every clip and every check, and I felt like that kid again, the one who used to draw himself diving for treasure in the margins of his notebooks. Except this time I was not drawing it. I was prepared, I had all my gear, and I was good to go.
Underwater I was a rookie and it showed, but the reason was not nerves, it was pure excitement. I am living my childhood dream, I am actually scuba diving, and I burned through my air because I had not learned yet to slow my breathing down. I moved too much. We do not talk down there, so everything runs on hand signals, and the first thing she did was check that I could speak the language. She would flash me a sign and I had to read it and answer it: the thumb and finger in a circle for okay, a flat palm for stop, a thumb up to go up, a thumb down to go deeper. She would ask how much air I had, and I would read my gauge and show her the number on my fingers. Then came the real drills. I took the BCD and tank off my body underwater and put the whole rig back on. I pulled my own regulator out of my mouth, gave the out-of-air sign, a flat hand drawn across the throat, and switched to the spare second stage on her gear, her alternate air, and breathed off that. I learned the sign for a problem, a flat hand rocked side to side, so I could tell her the instant something was wrong. It is all there to prove you can stay calm and solve a problem with no surface to run to. And the whole time I was grinning around the mouthpiece. I got to about fifteen metres, and time just stopped. I honestly do not know how long we were down there, twenty minutes or two hours, I could not tell you. The visibility was low, and I did not care even a little, because I was finally living the thing I had wanted my entire life. Then we surfaced. I was helped back onto that old Vietnamese wooden boat, peeled off my fins and my gear, and sat down to watermelon, a banana, and a bowl of chicken pho. Day one, in the books. We ran back past the same rock formations and the same blue water, the limestone mountains rising straight out of the sea. I know how much the water takes out of you, but this was ten times anything surfing or snorkeling ever did. I got back to my room and crashed.
I was up at two thirty in the morning and had to be at the dock by six. I spent the morning quietly dreading the one thing left, the mask drill that had beaten me again and again. But I was not really worried, because I had a trick up my sleeve and I knew exactly what I was going to do. I ordered a Grab to the dock, met my instructor, and we ran the same beautiful route out, except this time I was waving at people, because I knew today was the day. And the water seemed to know it too. The visibility had opened all the way up, clear enough to see a couple of meters in front of me, which out there is a gift. We dropped at the same site, geared up, and ran the same checks I had drilled before every entry, the regulator, the gauge, the reserve. This time I made myself go slow, slow the breathing, cut the wasted movement, and we worked back through the drills. Then came the last one. She gave me the stop signal, we settled onto the ocean floor, and she pointed at her mask and pulled it from her face. Take yours off.
Here is the trick, the one I had decided the night before, right as I was crashing into bed. I lay there telling myself there was no way I was going to breathe in ocean water at fifteen metres and bolt for the surface coughing. That cannot happen. I would not make it, and it would turn into a real health and safety problem fast. So the answer came to me right away: just pinch your nose. I took the mask off and pinched my nose shut in the same instant, and I kept breathing, slow, in and out through the regulator. Then I slid the mask back on, tilted my head forward, and blew out through my nose to push the water out. That was it. Done. I could see the smile on my instructor through her own mask and regulator, because she knew exactly how hard I had fought this. She gave me the thumb, not the one that means go to the surface, the one that means you did it.
There is a feeling that does not have a clean word for it. You carry a picture in your head from the time you are a small kid, a picture of yourself moving through reefs and caves with a tank on your back, and you carry it for decades without ever once stepping inside it. And then one day you are in it. Not imagining it, not drawing it in a notebook. Inside it. That is what this dive was for me. We came up, my instructor congratulated me, the whole boat congratulated me, and all I could do was grin, because the kid who drew those pictures was right there at the surface with me.
What is next is the PADI Advanced Open Water certification, so I can go deeper and reach the places that have been on my list since I was a kid. The Great Barrier Reef. The Galapagos. The sunken warships off Malaysia. And the whole Caribbean, which I grew up in, summer after summer, from Turks and Caicos to Grand Cayman. Nha Trang was the first, and the first one always stays close. It will not be the last. This summer I have already mapped out the next dives, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. See you in the blue.
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