Just about a month ago, as I was looking back over a few weeks of quietude and relative sedentariness, I received a phone call from someone I shall refer to as “my favorite pirate in the whole world (MFPITWW).” With a heartfelt “YARGHHH, ye lusty wench,” she proceeded to nudge my thoughts in the direction of high seas adventures… only this time, she suggested adventuring under it. MFPITWW was in a mood to learn to SCUBA dive, and, really, who am I to resist such a call to action when it so patently fits my idiom?

With minimal difficulty, we found ourselves a willing accomplice to teach us to dive over the course of a couple weekends, and as the big day drew closer, the pirate and I sat down to begin our studies. During a rather slow and oppressive Sunday, we subjected ourselves to the opening act of the PADI dive course -- a video that we could not help but subject to our merciless criticism -- while we attempted to grasp just what it was we were getting into with this whole diving thing. It turned out that we would have to spend much more money and many more hours than this initial outlay in order to truly establish our diving credentials and be qualified as menaces or sub-aquatic booty-hunters of the first rank, but such small considerations were not enough to deter our dogged pirating selves from something so promising.

Thus, on the appointed Saturday, MFPITWW and I arrived at our instructor’s doorstep with our books and pens, our vital statistics and dive tables, and got down to business. Time flowed gradually by while we labored through rules and regulations, calculations of blood nitrogen content, and the workings of the mysterious compass (neither of us had been boy scouts -- duh) until evening arrived and we finished our written exams, exhausted and in need of a few beers. But with a Sunday of closed water drills looming over us like the sword of Damocles, we could barely enjoy our traditional Saturday Guinnessi for fear of having to learn the mechanics of diving with a hangover.

Sunday morning was cracking open as we arrived at the pool, ready to get this diving thing started by first getting our little selves oriented to all the gear. We donned our vests and tanks, our suits and fins and masks and weights -- evidently humans need help to sink -- and finally got to getting sub-surface. We worked through recovering our regulators, adjusting our buoyancy and surfacing safely, and then, to our dismay, it was time for the mask flooding drills. Both the pirate and I wear contact lenses and live in abject fear of our precious pieces of optical glass floating away as we inadvertently open our eyes underwater, meaning that we would have to do these drills blind. Oh joy, oh rapture, hovering under 10 feet of water with bubbles flooding up my nose, trying to replace my mask and get all the water out of it without inhaling nasally or opening my eyes. Such is not at all my idea of a good time, thank you very much; and at one point, I threw a tantrum worthy of a two-year-old, sitting down on the bottom of the pool and refusing to play nice.

All the same, we made it through, and, by the end of the day, we were done with our skills and ready to take on the open water -- though that would have to wait until the next weekend.

The following Saturday broke clear and bright, and we met our intrepid instructor at the marina, ready for a day in the water. Out on a catamaran off Waikiki, we began dive number one, our familiarization dive, wherein our only requirement was to swim about and get comfortable -- easy enough. We surfaced, warmed back up in the bright noon sun, and ticked off our very first SCUBA dive. Whew.

And then came dive number two, the one I had been dreading -- the one where I would have to kneel on the sandy bottom of the ocean with over thirty feet of water above me and remove my mask, put it back on, and clear it of water. My stomach began to churn; I broke out in a sweat (if that’s possible underwater) and could focus on nothing other than the desire to breathe through my nose. I was supposed to go first while the pirate waited, and, as the precedent setting tantrum of the previous weekend should have indicated I would, I panicked (even though every bit of advice I had received had been “don’t panic in the ocean”). Throwing caution to the wind (or current), I kicked my legs and pumped my arms and raced for the surface with my instructor stubbornly clinging to my weight belt, slowing my progress, and making me even madder as all I wanted was to open my eyes and breath above the water -- is that so much to ask?

Sigh. What a debacle.

I hacked up bits of lung for the rest of the night, and, brooding over my beers, I practiced repeatedly plugging my nose while inhaling through my mouth and exhaling through my nose while trying to keep my mouth open. People at the bar thought I was cracked; I’ll just cop to that now.

In the end, dives number three andnumber four were far more successful, and I conquered the panic of the day before and can call myself a certified open-water diver, but I shall not forget what a pain in the ass that skill was. May I never find myself bobbing along on the bottom of the beautiful briny sea with a flooded mask -- ‘cause that would just suck.