It was Day 3 of the scuba diving course, and it was time to take our first breaths in the ocean.

We packed all our gear and loaded them in a car before we headed off to Long Beach. Once we got there we got dressed in our way too small and tight wet suits and assembled our BCDs. By the time everything was ready, I was sweating from top to toe and I was ready to enter the 13-degree water.

It was quite difficult getting the hang of having control under water, and Helena and I were floating a bit around everywhere. We continued doing some more skills under water including us practicing using a compass; we didn’t exactly end up where we were supposed to go, but practice makes perfect they say!

This is a picture of a nudibranch, which is a type of snail/slug and the white rings you can see is the eggs the nudibranch is laying

We were down at 6m under water and after our skills were completed we had some time to just explore the ocean floor. We did two dives, which were about 45 minutes each. Our instructor, Carel, is an excellent photographer and took all the pictures I’ve put in this post – quite amazing!

The only thing is that things lose colour under water (because of water’s reflective properties), so when we are swimming under water, we don’t see the fish and other sea creatures with such clear and beautiful colours as you can see on the pictures. So when Carel showed us the pictures after our dive, we didn’t really believe him when he told us that we saw all of this 🙂

At the end of the day I was feeling a lot more comfortable being under water for a longer period of time. It had been my first day properly scuba diving and I was loving it already!

The picture above is from our Dive Log, which we update after every dive we make. So here you can see we were under for 40 minutes, at 6.4 metres, and visibility was 3-5 metres. It’s just a nice way of keeping track of the dives you do and what you see under water 🙂