My wife and her friend found a scuba certification course locally through Groupon. We spent this weekend doing the theory and practical side of it. The only thing remaining is the open water dive.The entire thing was up and down emotionally.

We spent Friday night and Saturday morning doing all the theoretical stuff. Mainly focusing on all the dangerous aspects of scuba diving; along with familiarity of the gear that we would be using. Nearly all of it was focused one way or another on safety.

The hardest part of the theoretical component was the tables with their pressure groups, bottom times and surface times. The tables are complicated and thankfully have largely been replaced with digitized computers.

Anyway, you have to find a pressure group, flip the table over and then flip it over again and so forth. When it came to the final test I promptly forgot all the aspects of doing the tables and struggled on those questions.

If you are doing the theoretical side, try and get a good grip on the tables before you go. The rest of the stuff you can pick up quickly and memorize during the instruction. The tables are more like maths were repetition of problem solving is better for memory retention than just rote.

The practical stuff was all done in a local diving pool. It was quite cool. It had two deep ends with a shallow part in the middle of the pool. Being Arizona in summer the outside temperature was 105F and the pool was 82F.

Despite the warm water and air, the main issue is still that if you are in the pool for an extended period it will bring your body temperature down and make you cold. On the second day we all wore heavier wetsuits and were thankful for it.

Instruction was proving we could handle the gear, could swim with the flippers etc. And then there was the diving instruction. Which was where I had problems. Breathing under water with a scuba lung was difficult and made me anxious.

Apparently I am a 'nose breather' which means I fog up the glasses and push air out through my goggles. I had to concentrate on breathing out of my mouth which meant when I had to do something else everything fell to pieces and i would forget to breath. Not fun.

I will probably go into local folklore there as I went through three tanks in a day. I was breathing deeply to try and control my breath and remain relaxed. I wasn't hyperventilating or anything,but whatever I was doing I was gulping down air at prodigious rates.

By the end of the second day my consumption had come down, but for a while I was trying to conserve air and was blowing up the BCD manually when I got to the surface so I didn't have to say what the SPG was on.

If I was to do this again I would pay extra to have the instructor just work with you and a buddy. Non-one else. We did it with a group of eight in the pool with two instructors and it took too long. We go cold. Bored. Agitated; and worse everyone had different problems which slowed down the entire certification process.

My wife and I left to have lunch and came back in the afternoon and did the remainder of the course with just us and the two instructors. We spend through it and had an enjoyable time. Like I said if I was to do it again, I would go that route and get direct one on one instruction with a buddy.

I don't know if I am sold on scuba. I don't want to do the big deep dives. I think it is too dangerous for that. I just want to look at fish in Mexico or Hawaii without have to worry about a snorkel. That is all I want to do, float around a little below the surface for thirty mins or so. That would be awesome.

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