Scuba for Seniors

Yes. That's me.

Just before I turned fifty, Husby took me and our two youngest children on a holiday.

To Italy. And, even more exciting, on a tall ship cruise through the blue Mediterranean waters surrounding Italy.

We met our second son there. He was stationed in Bosnia and was quite happy to make the short hop to meet us when he was on leave.

There are lots of stories.

The one I’m going to tell you about could easily be titled “Scuba Diving for the Direction-ally Challenged”.

Ahem . . .

Whilst Husby was topside, exploring such wonders as . . . Malta. Sicily. Corsica. The rest of his party was under the water - air canisters strapped to our backs and flippers and wet suits correctly and prudently donned – exploring the wonders of undersea ship wrecks. Fish schools. Sea life.

We still argue about who had the most fun.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

First we had to get in the water . . .

It was a perfect day.

Perfect as only a bright, sunny day in the Mediterranean can get. The tender, filled to the gunwales with happy, excited tourists all attractively clothed in black wetsuits, made its way out to the center of the bay immediately adjacent to the Island of Malta.

We had been given extensive instruction.

Do this.

Never, ever even attempt to do that.

We were ready.

Our first duty was to attach any and all tubes necessary to continued breathing and/or life, and fall backward into the warm, welcoming depths of the blue, blue water.

I emphasize the word ‘fall’.

It was a simple procedure.

All you had to do was fall.

And this is precisely where I came to grief.

I flipped over backwards, twisted around a bit.

And came up under the boat.

Under the boat.

Uh-oh.

It was about then that I got totally confused.

And forgot which way was up.

I was equally muddled about which way was down.

While I was thrashing around, trying to sort things out, my knowledgeable (and very attractive, but that is a different story) instructor, who fortunately had up and down . . . erm . . . down, reached in and extracted me.

Whew.

We had an amazing time. We swam through great clouds of yellow fish. Past entire undersea gardens. And flew out over a cliff.

The best of all was the WW2 battleship wreck which we covered from stem to stern.

An entire new hemisphere opened to our eyes.

And me? The instructor kept me right by his side the entire time.

His reasoning was simple.

If I could get lost falling out of the boat, just imagine what I could do with a whole ocean.

Sigh.