Blogging Pubbitch

Fish don't talk much. They open and close their mouths a lot, and sometimes a smaller fish will swim inside, have a look around and eat something from between the teeth, but it's very unusual to hear them say anything. I've just spent a lot of time with the fishes, not in a "he’s sleeping with the fishes wearing concrete boots" Mafia-style, but in a "doing my Advanced Open Water PADI course"-style, so I consider myself to be something of an authority. I suppose that it's possible that fish that don't live on the Outer Great Barrier Reef are far chattier but as the past owner of a couple of goldfish, I don’t think so.

What fish do very well, though, is buoyancy control. This is something I am most jealous of, because my buoyancy control needs more work. I know this because rather than floating gracefully in the water, hovering like some sort of sub-aquatic helicopter, I was floating under water like the sort of helicopter that gets featured in the news along with frequent use of the word "disaster". To be honest, by the end of the tenth dive in two and a half days, I was getting a lot better at the whole thing, though I was completely shattered.

There’s something restful about hanging suspended upside down in the water, surrounded by a profusion of fish, turning in any direction with the flick of a fin. "Turning in any direction with the flick of a fin" is probably something that most of us would want to be able to do if we were to find ourselves floating upside-down, but for now we’ll pretend that it's somewhere we actually want to be. Better yet, there’s the beauty of clambering out of the ocean, shivering into the warmth of tropical sunlight.

It was great fun. I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Better yet, Holly and I both managed to pass our Advanced Open Water, so we're now all set to do a recreational dive almost anywhere. This is going to be great!