Scuba Diver Ko!

I didn't learn to swim until 5th grade, and had snorkeled exactly one time, in 9th grade, prior to coming to the Philippines. So I never really thought that I'd be a certified PADI Open Water Scuba Diver a mere two months after arriving at my training site. But I am! 6 PCTs in my training batch finished a quick but intense training course over the last 3 Sundays. Yesterday we made two dives at Apo Island to finish it up, which is one of the top dive sites in one of the top dive countries in the world. Which means that while a lot of people have to dive to the bottom of a lake and look for a toilet or fishing lures while they're getting certified, I was trying to get my buoyancy correct while looking at sea turtles, large amounts of tropical fish, and a giant wall of coral going 40 meters straight down. It's like diving in a tropical aquarium but so much better. Hopefully this is a skill I'll be able to use at my site, since one of the marine reserves is very deep and it's hard to get any good data or monitoring via snorkeling. I'll surely be doing it for fun, but the costs add up, even in the Philippines. Now the objective is to get NGOs to pay me to dive. One of my friends took a lot of underwater pictures yesterday, so hopefully I can get some up. New on my wish list: underwater casing for my camera.