tl;dr: Trip went well; Didn't see lionfish; need to dive more!
Well, I'm back from my trip to St Lucia, and it all went very well (except for one little thing I'll get to).
I arrived on a Saturday too late for diving, but went to the dive shop to sign up for Sunday's dive. On Sunday there was only one mid-morning dive. So I signed up. I think they were surprised at how prepared I was. They first noticed I was over 50 and had checked one of the aliments boxes on the medical form. "Oh, mon, you'll have to visit the doctor first to get approved for diving!" they said, would be an extra charge ($100-$150 I think). I pulled out the physical from my own doctor I got the week before who signed the PADI medical form. "Ok, so when was the last time you dived"? A year ago in Utila, I show them from my log book. "So, mon, you'll have to take the refresher course in the pool before you can go on any dive trips, that's $100!". I replied "But aha! I took the local refresher course two weeks ago, and here's my sticker on my PADI card!". Grumble, grumble, grumble, I heard from the dive shop manager. They reluctantly signed me up for the Sunday dive.
I showed up to take the bus to the marina for the dive, quite a bit apprehensive being the "noob". On the boat before we got to the dive site, I found the divemaster on the bow with the other crew divers... and as I went up to him, he was real cold, thinking something like "are you going to tell me to do my job, you rich, white, American??"... but when I actually told him I was new to diving and just certified last year, he became the most friendly and helpful guide. I think he was afraid I was some master diver going to try to tell him where to go, what to do or how to do it.
Anyway, the dive went pretty well. These are pretty easy dives, overall. On Monday thru Wednesday, there's always a 60ft dive in the morning, a short SI, and then a 40 foot dive. Pretty much everyone stays together in groups of 6 to 8. Something that kinda bugged me was there was no focus really on the buddy system, either for equipment checks onboard or while diving. While I never strayed far from the dive master, I found it a little unsettling for the equipment checks. So I just went over everything on myself 3 or 4 times to the best of my recollection (it became much easier on the later dives). I think on Tuesday on my 5th dive (out of 7 total), we were all getting ready, and I was all geared up putting my fins on, and only then realized I hadn't put my weight belt back on. (also on my 4th dive, I had put my weight belt on backwards, and didn't realize this until moments before the group started our decent.)
On the last day, we had a different dive master who did buddy us up, so I felt a little better about that.
After seeing a bunch of wildlife on the first and second days, I decided to buy a cheap $20 underwater camera to capture some of what I saw. I think I took one or two photos before diving, and it worked fine. But once I got underwater, the shutter jammed, I couldn't get it to work. I was sure I was winding the film, but it just wasn't working. Now I know what you guys mean by a distraction. I became quite distracted in trying to get it to work (I mean, how hard can it be?)... so I finally gave up after about 10 minutes of futzing with it. All the while, NOT really paying attention to the dive or wildlife. Nothing bad happened, but it's amazing how something so small became such a distraction. I can now much better see how a GoPro and/or a bailout bottle would be added distractions.
On the morning of my last day of dives, we had a good group of people on the boat. I was telling my buddy (who was somewhat of a beginner also) that all I wanted to see on this trip was a lionfish. I had 5 dives down at that point, and hadn't seen one yet. At the end of the last dive (of my trip), we all were getting back on the boat. My buddy and another guy following us with a professional camera rig said to me "did you see that HUGE lionfish??".. "No, where?" They said I swam right by it, maybe 2 to 3 feet away. It was hanging out above a big sponge coral. Nope, never saw it. They were both behind me, so they couldn't signal or point it out. The only thing I can think of is that I was swimming near the bottom and scanning the bottom for wildlife, and never really "looked up". So I must have swam by the sponge coral below the lionfish and just never saw it in my peripheral vision. The photog guy said he got some great shots of it, and I gave him my email address, but I haven't heard back from him yet. Oh well, there's always next time (we're thinking of going to Grenada in the winter). Missing the lionfish was the one little thing that didn't go well for the week, very disappointed about that. And lionfish are "everywhere" down there, I'm told.
Towards the end of my 3rd dive (a 40 footer), I accidentally became more positively buoyant than normal.. I guess I had some air in my BDC I couldn't purge. So I started ascending and couldn't stop, no matter what I tried! Once I reached the surface and was fully upright, I was finally able to purge my BCD of any extra air, and descended quickly to get back down the group. Luckily it was just a 40 foot dive and not 60. The entire event maybe lasted one minute. Interestingly, the dive computer counted that quick ascent as about 80 seconds of the safety stop. So when we ascended for the end of the dive, my computer said I only needed a 1m40s safety stop, but I stayed of course for the full 3 minutes.
On our second to last dive, we lost one member of our group all together. A woman also with limited experience had the same thing happen, except it was a 60 foot dive. Once she surfaced, she didn't attempt to join us and the boat came and picked her up. When one diver in our group counted one diver missing and alerted the DM, the DM surfaced while we waited at the bottom.. then he came back down. He didn't really convey what may have happened, or if she was OK. But we continued the dive. Only when we surfaced did her boyfriend/husband (buddy??) see her sitting on the boat safe and sound.
Only once during all seven dives did I get down to 1000psi (the announced safety zone), and that was really at the end of the dive anyway (I think about 45 minutes), so it wasn't like I was ending the dive "short."
Having the dive computer was a necessity for accurate depth and timings (thanks again Dirk!). The only thing with the DC that Dirk loaned to me (Shearwater Research Petrel) was that I couldn't really make out all the numbers in the display. I'm old, so I need reading glasses, and I even had 2.0 diopter inserts in my diving mask, which helped a lot. But even still, it was hard to read the smaller numbers/readouts on the display. Most divers (even the advanced ones) and the typical round-faced, LCD dive computers that seemed to serve their use. On one trip, one of the more experienced divers came over and asked me "hey, can you get 'Game of Thrones' on that thing???".
I know this is a long post, but "just one more thing". I didn't realize how important people treated their dive log books. I thought it was a casual thing for people to just log their dives, but it's serious stuff! The issue I have, and I think this must be nearly universal on trips like this, was when we got back to the marina, everyone was running around trying to find out the actual name/location of each dive. In St Lucia, most of the names are French based, and the locals have accents, so it's hard to hear them announce the names. Everyone was scrambling with each other to find someone with the correct info. I know there are online log books, but not everyone wants to take an ipad or electronic device with them. But still, there has to be some way for the dive shop to post immediately after (or during) the dive all the info everyone needs for their log books. I hastily scratched down what I could, and only on the very last day I had some extra time at the marina to open up the log books and record each dive's start/end time, SI, max depth, and my starting and ending PSIs. Being a technologist, it just seemed to me there had to be a better way to centralize this information and provide it to all the divers right after the dive to fill out their log books. But nope, it was just people running around with soggy log books and pens that didn't write very well.
By the end of the trip, I was much more confident than the start four days earlier. During the last couple of dives I was able to stop thinking about all the things to remember (from a technical point of view) and focus on the actual *diving* part. I'm looking forward to booking another trip.
Thanks for all your comments and suggestions!
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