Becoming a Divemaster in Taganga Colombia! My Experience

Hard working carrying the scuba tanks!

Not so long ago I got to Taganga, Colombia... A small little town on the colombian caribbean sea, known mostly for the party and diving... Most people just gets trapped there for long time... the town itself is not so beautiful not even the beach is that special but underwater is beautiful...

Before getting there I was traveling for about 4 months by bus from argentina crossing Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador... I was so anxious to start diving (thing that i never tried before) that from Ecuador i took three buses for a total of 70 hours to get to the colombian caribbean...

First thing was to get a volunteering job at a hostel to save some money, second thing to get also a volunteering exchange (work for a divemaster certification)... Was pretty easy, I think it took me about 1 week to start...

A got a pretty good deal at the Alchemist hostel and at Reef Shepard diving center, awesome people in both places...

If you never dived you should try it... the feeling must be similar to what astronauts feel... You have to learn to control your buoyancy... once you've done that you can stay at the same depth easely...

There's a lot of information but i'm not gonna explain everything, otherwise i would just refer you to the dive masters manual... a few hundred pages...

Main things to have always in mind:

• Never dive alone
• Always check all the equipment more than once before going under
• while going down, every 2 meters, or once you know yourself, every time you need it. Compensate your ear pressure.
  This is easy, you just have to pinch your nose (the mask is soft to allow this) and blow some air pressure to your inner
  ear.
• The lead weights on your belt have to be personalized to your body beyonce.
• Before going deep you need to learn how to clear the water from your mask... to do this you hold the top of the mask to your forehead and blow some air through your nose, the air expels the water...
• Another important thing to learn is how to recover your regulator (the air supply that goes in your mouth)
  To do this there are two techniques, one is to reach over your shoulder to the air botle and follow the whose from there, the second one is to do a wide sweep with your right arm touching you leg first and going behind and up over your head, then the hose is gonna be over your arm...
• While diving you have to often look at your gages (how much air you have left, how deep you are and how much time you can stay without too much nitrogen being accumulated in your blood) you can check the time you can stay at certain depth looking at your diving computer... it's like a watch that shows you a lot of important data and changes constantly with your moves...

An interesting fact that no one think about before diving is that if you go to 10 meters the pressure surrounding you is twice as much as on the surface and because of that the pressurized air you breath is twice as much in every breath...
every 10 meters you go further you have to add one extra atmosphere pressure... so if you go to 20 M you are taking three times as much air on every breath... Because of that is that the nitrogen level on your blood can get pretty high...

If you stay too long or go too deep and don't take enough time to come back up, the nitrogen in your blood build up into bubbles, dose bubbles can go to your joints or worst they can build up in your brain... this is called decompression thickness... To make it easy to understand... imagine a bottle of soda water... you don't see any bubbles before opening it, thats because the bottle its holding the pressure exactly as the water above you will do when diving.... if you open the bottle too fast the gas releases violently and overflow the bottle... So, if you're diving too deep or for too long and the nitrogen builds up in your blood, you should go up slowly and even stop at certain depths for some time to allow the gas to release slowly... (decompression stops)

I don't want you to be scared... divers are really conscious about all the dangers and they keep an eye on new divers to avoid problems. But i'm gonna tell you another danger... getting out of air is not a real problem, you're always diving with someone that can share his air and also you're checking your own air supply and if it gets low you simply finish the dive...

The other big risk if you're dumb enough is if you go up holding your breath. Imagine an air balloon, you fill it with air and put it under water, ten meters under water... the pressure is twice as much as on the surface so the balloon shrinks to about half its size... now... what you think it would happen to your inner balloons (your lungs) if you fill them with pressurized air at 10 M depth and then you hold the air in and go to the surface?
Yes... bad thing... your lungs would expand twice as big and blow up!!! so, DON'T DO IT!
If you have to go up fast (avoid it if you can) do it releasing air or with your lungs empty.... Again, don't be scared... there are a lot of precautions and professionals taking care of new divers... Also, if you're scared of water better to stay out of it... if you're under and you panic you would do the dumbest things possible....

So...
You read the manual, pay attention to your instructor, do your first training dive and you're ready to enjoy!!!
For me there's a before and after diving... I use to love the beach, the waves, the sun, the sand, the wind, the bives... but after diving... wow!!! there's a whole other world there!!! (2/3 of the planet surface is water)

Most schools have their own little boat! pretty shakee some days but always a fun ride!

Me on the photo (Photo taken by my friend Santiago Estrada)

This beautiful fish is the "lionfish" is the only fish you are encouraged to kill because it feeds on other fish eggs and it's causing a lot of damage... It is not original from the area (another human mistake) (Photo taken by my friend Santiago Estrada)

I just love this photo, was my profile picture on FB for a while (Photo taken by my friend Santiago Estrada)

Just a little taste of the underwater life (Photo taken by my friend Santiago Estrada)

Puffer fish! I love this little guys, their mouth has an eternal smile and his eyes, if the right ligh, oh man, you can see the galaxy on them!

Not sure if the right name for this one is butterfly fish or bat fish... looks more like a butterfly to me...
This one looks like a normal fish until it feels threatened, then it opens his beautiful wings...

***** If you find the text boring scroll down and check the photos *****

All so beautiful... but F....!!! At the end of the day the poor divemaster has to refill all the bottles... :P
Luckely i had an amazing team and we all enjoyed a few beers while doing this and watching sunset

To finish with this post I need to tell you something... After more than 100 dives and some more snorkeling and freediving(diving without air bottles) my favorite is the last one... the main difference is the silence... while scuba diving you have the constante sound off your breathing and the bubbles but freediving is totally natural, you only hear the underwater world sounds... Also it has, at least from my perspective, less dangers... you can go up and down as much as you want, you don't need to keep controlling gages or anything... so thats my passion now! :)

Here I share a video compilation I did... from the beginning till 2,45 or so you can see sporadically my image just holding there, thats the real time i holded my breath then, now i can hold just a little more time... I tried with the editing to transmit what i was seeing in my mind with my eyes closed while holding myself to an old anchor... all the images on the video are mine...

***** All text is mine and the photos that doesnt say (Photo taken by my friend Santiago Estrada) are also mine *****
I don't have a good underwater camera, this was taken with a GoPro 2....

I hope you enjoyed my post, if you did please, upvote, follow, share it or whatever you can do to help me get something back of my time invested here.... :)
Thanks!
Lucian