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I finished my certification dives in the Bahamas and I have my temporary PADI Open Water Diver ID card. The official card with my photo on it should arrive in the mail soon.

I dove with a Divemaster/Instructor and two others going after their certifications and the boat carried several other divers of mixed ages and experience who were led by other Divemasters.

My group went on four dives in two days in shallow water. We never went below 20 feet. The experience was lovely amidst coral reefs and brightly colorful reef fishes. The water was very warm and clear and our PADI instructor was cheerful and helpful.

On the first day, we started with a getting-to-know you dive where we demonstrated our familiarity with the equipment and played follow-the-leader with our Divemaster around the boat -- never far from a safety line.

Afterwards, we spent a few minutes at the surface discussing the skills that we were about to be tested on and then we dropped to the sandy bottom to demonstrate such tasks as mask-clearing, removing and replacing weights, buddy-breathing and ultimately a controlled emergency ascent. At the surface again, we were tested on removing and replacing our buoyancy control devices and a few more emergency skills. That was the end of the first day. We spent perhaps 45 minutes under water and at that depth nobody was at any serious risk.

On the second day our first dive was a tour around the corals, after which we returned to the boat for a brief rest. With the last of our skills tests quickly out of the way, we three students were buddied up to freely explore our bit of reef for over 20 minutes, taking pictures and poking our noses into odd crevasses.

After my previous post, I should mention that my mask performed flawlessly. It never fogged or leaked, even after flooding it and removing it in various tests. While I had a bottle of commercial defog in my bag, I never used it. My home-brewed defog made from 2-parts baby shampoo to 1 part water was a tremendous success and it smelled much nicer than the other stuff.

While he was otherwise a really great guy, a few things that our instructor did were disconcerting. After being indoctrinated by the PADI course not to disturb the environment, I wasn't sure what to make of it when our instructor detoured to rip out chunks of coral and overturn rocks looking for lobsters. Another thing that bugged me was the way that he made notes in my log, exaggerating our bottom times and depths and reducing our surface intervals with the result that my calculations of our final pressure groups (residual nitrogen) were significantly skewed. Since my log is my own record of a dive, I'd rather have filled in the information, myself and aimed for accuracy.

Even with those little caveats, I have to say that the experience was stellar. There's no land-bound adventure that compares to it. While a diver is bound by safety rules and the firm physical limits of air and pressure, exploring the sea floor is nevertheless an expression of freedom that is without parallel on the surface.