So you’ve taken a leap of faith and signed yourself up for your first ever day of scuba diving. After years of watching movies and TV shows, seeing the underwater world and the life that belongs to it, you decide its time for you to be a part it.

Morning comes and you’re on a Scuba Junkie boat heading to the islands. You look around and see clear, calm turquoise coloured waters. On reaching one of the tropical islands around Kota Kinabalu, your scuba diving  instructor starts his briefing. There you will learn the basic fundamentals of scuba diving, which are;

• How water pressure affects your body and how to deal with it.
• Scuba equipment and how everything works.
• Hand signals (underwater is quiet time).
• Basic skills such as clearing your regulator and mask.
• No fly rule (no flying within 18 hours of your last dive).
• Conservation and how to dive responsibly.

Before you know it, you’ve got your equipment strapped on, sitting on the edge of the boat preparing to roll backwards into the water like James Bond. You’re nervous but slowly rollback and land in the water and float up feeling like you were just on a roller coaster. You start your short swim to the shore getting to shallow water. You reach waters around chest level and your instructor briefs you on what’s going to happen. You kneel down and see this whole new world you’ve entered into.

First few breaths underwater feel odd, breathing entirely through your mouth feels strange but okay. Skill session starts and you see your instructor demonstrating a skill, regulator comes out of mouth and back in, and exhale. Seems simple. You try it and you complete it with ease. You then complete a few more skills and your instructor says it’s time to go see the underwater world.

You slowly swim out to the slope and your ears feel uncomfortable, you see your instructor looking at you and pinching his nose and making a blowing motion, then you remember. You pinch and blow gently from your nose and the discomfort goes away. You continue diving along the sand, seeing damsel fish hanging around picking fights with other fish. Move along a little more and see a blue spotted stingray emerging almost slow-motion-like from under the sand flapping its wings and gracefully gliding away. Not forgetting the lovable clown fish(nemo), ever so fierce in protecting their home. First session is mostly over sand and bits of coral to get used to swimming underwater. Your instructor gives you a thumbs up indicating it’s time to head up to the surface and take a break.

After a break on land and chatting away with the other divers, it’s time to get back into the water. This time your instructor says we’ll be mostly over coral for the whole dive and to watch your fins and stay well above the corals. Corals are fragile and break easily. Your boat takes you out to the back of one of the islands, you look out and see the coral reef right under the boat. You do your back roll like a pro and swim towards your instructor. You and the gang drop over the sand right beside the coral reef, readying yourselves in preparation for your amazing dive. Onto the coral reef and there’s just so much life! Colourful feather stars on corals, blue sea stars, groups of hundreds of fusiliers coming down from midwater onto the reef. The lazy grouper chilling on a coral and swimming away as you get close. A turtle swimming by coming to check out the new kid on the block. Who would not fall in love with such a world!

What are you waiting for? 😉