Sunday, October 12, 2008

Diving!

Hilo, HI

I feel pretty good about getting around to one of the new things on my list of things to try while I'm here in Hawaii: scuba diving. After last week's lessons-only day (the weather would not permit a first dive), we had our first dive yesterday.

I can't say that it was an amazing experience, given that most of the dive was spent practicing fundamentals. It was still exhilarating. You have to put a great amount of trust in the equipment[1]. Putting your face in the water and breathing requires you to overcome a rather powerful intuition that this should not be possible. Hence, it's a good idea to start breathing through the regulator before putting your face in the water.

Again, this was a dive that was practicing fundamentals: taking off the regulator and putting it back in while under water, using someone else's alternate air source, recovering your regulator, etc. Most of these things are important to know and practice in a controlled dive environment. Once you know what it's like, you are less likely to panic.

I'm looking forward to the future dives. There will be more fundamentals, but they should be more interesting as well. More depth, hopefully, as we only went down 15 feet on this first dive.

I'll be putting it off for a few weeks, as I'm headed to La Serena, Chile tomorrow night. It'll take two days to get there, so I'm planning on loading my laptop up with some pending tv shows.

[1] This is not to say that you do your own equipment checks on the rentals. The O-ring on my tank was looking a little used. It was fine for this dive, but the dive instructor made a note of it for replacement. Not to worry, I'm going to keep my eye on those O-rings.

Friday, October 10, 2008

Day at the Beach


Sunset
Originally uploaded by pschwarz.
Hilo, HI

I finally made it to the beach. I'm not a beach guy but it is nice. It's also the first sunset I've seen since I've been here.

Beautiful.

Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Big Island Tango

Hilo, HI

There's tango here. It is a small community, but it's relatively new. There's about a dozen regulars, but a couple of beginners came this week. During the week, we have a lesson and a practica. Both are useful for retaining skills, but I do find myself surprisingly on the "skilled" end of the spectrum.

The other islands actually have pretty decent tango communities, even though the populations of many of the others are smaller. Apparently there is a workshop on the island of Kauai, which should have a decent turnout - it has a real Argentinian, after all.

This tango group is definitely giving credence to the idea the Big Island is the last place to get anything.