Raving about Diving

An interesting morning spent diving in the lagoon today! Called a baptême de plongée, it’s an initiation to diving where everything is done for you, the idea is really to see if you like it and if you’re capable of not panicking underwater.

Hippocampe Plongée took six of us out to the passe en S, an S-shaped tunnel in the coral barrier reef where you can easily see fish and corals. Two monitors guided us down in turn, and we spent a good twenty minutes underwater gazing at multi-coloured fish, corals that looked soft and squishy and were not only hard as rocks but grazed and burned skin that came too close, touching tiny anemones that tried to eat our fingers, scaring shoals of bright blue fish and having a staring match with a large toad-like creature, breathing from a bottle through a tube, learning signals such as “All OK” or “My ears hurt”. I had to come up to the surface at one point because a rather large quantity of water had found its way into my mask and up my nose, but I loved the experience and am raring to go again. There are four levels of diving expertise, each worthy of a diploma, but I’ll probably do another initiation to get used to it before I start taking proper lessons. Well worth fifty euros, it’s beautiful down there. The world seems to slow down, it’s all very peaceful. I even have a certificate to show for it.