With the second weekend of ADP swiftly approaching, I realized I’d better hurry up and write about last weekend, which was the opening of LA County’s Advanced Diver Program. From now until October, I’ll be spending two out of every three weekends getting my diving butt kicked into shape. It adds up to over 100 hours of instruction, including lectures on every conceivable topic, beach dives at a variety of locations, pool instruction, and random adventures like visiting with the Long Beach Search and Rescue folks, or moving underwater pipes around in Lake Castaic.

Opening day was pretty uneventful. I dragged myself out of bed around 6:30am on a Saturday morning to drive down to Carson and sit in “classroom” at Victoria Park with no air conditioning. ADP is as cheap as it is because all the instructors are volunteers, and the facilities are donated by the county. Beggars can’t be choosers! There were about twenty students signed up for the class this year, of all levels of experience. We spent the morning getting an introduction to LA County’s dive programs, and in the afternoon heard a lecture on the history of diving.

Sunday was more exciting: our first pool session. Up first was the swim test:

• A 300 yard swim was up first: 6 lengths of the double-sized (50 yard) pool. It’s surprising how many scuba divers are pretty lousy swimmers; the lifeguards actually got all ready to dive in and start saving people. Since my usual swim at the Caltech pool is 2500 yards, I pretty much kicked ass at this.
• I also kicked ass at treading water, since for me that’s basically just floating with the occasional foot movement. I kicked significantly less ass (read: none whatsoever) at treading water with my arms up in the air. Turns out my arms are both heavy and quite buoyant; without them in the water, I sink like a rock.
• Kicked some more you-know-what at the underwater swim, which actually worried me the most. Swim 20 yards underwater (from the middle of the pool, so no pushing off); pick up a weight belt at the 10ft end of the pool, and carry it to the surface. I nailed this on the first try, after watching an ex-navy guy have to do it twice. Rock on.
• My final swim-test success: the tired-diver tow. We had to tow an “unconscious” diver the length of the pool (50 yards), unless we were going out for the instructor scholarship (which I plan to do) – then we were advised it would take 100 yards to impress our divemasters. Apparently they just wanted to see if we would do it – but I did.

It always boosts my ego when my chubby self is in better shape than 75% of the skinny folks. I probably shouldn’t get too full of myself, though, with all those beach dives looming…

The rest of the morning was spent doing boring old pool skills (mask removals, regulator retrievals, etc). This was made marginally more exciting by the fact that I worked with a divemaster who’s been teaching scuba diving for more than 40 years. He was just a joy to watch: so smooth and confident in the water, with absolutely perfect form.

In the afternoon, we all traipsed over to Sea Lab in Redondo Beach for a seminar on fish identification. I didn’t find this terribly useful, since I’m already a big fish id geek from years of captioning Jeff’s photos. The fun part came post-lecture, when we got to take a tour of all the fish tanks in the back. You’d be surprised how much fun you can have with a huge bucket full of kelp bass. Those dudes are seriously amusing!

Weekend #2 starts tomorrow, and features our first beach dive. Here’s hoping I don’t get creamed too badly by the surf; it would kind of undo all that ego-boosting that the swim test achieved. (Also, it would hurt.)