Our final week getting our scientific diving certification
I never knew that scientific diving required a whole new certification. I initially reached out to different professors to see if I could help out with their research, but I was rejected from all of them. This wasn’t without its success, though; they recommended that I take the AAUS (American Academy of Underwater Sciences) certification offered at San Jose State University's Moss Landing Marine Lab (MLML). This has led me down the rabbit hole that is scientific diving.
It had a few prerequisites to begin. First, I needed to become a rescue diver certified, which was the perfect excuse for me to get the certification. I was then only at the very first level of my certification. Second, it required me to have my own gear. I never saw this as an option, but I am so happy that I now have my own gear. It allows me the opportunity to customize and trim my buoyancy.
On the first day, I realized that I was the youngest by far. I was with other college students, a graduate, and even a post-grad student. Why or how I was there still boggled me. We started off with pool skills, and I immediately started to size everyone else up. You never want to be stuck with the worst person or be the worst diver. I was nervous to be worse than everybody else, but I realized that I was at the same level as everyone else, and this calmed down my nerves. We spent the first few days working in the pool at CSU Monterey Bay, the classroom at MLML, and checking out dives along the coast of Montmeeey Bay including Stanford’s Hopkins’s Marine Lab. The difference between a normal diver and a scientific diver is the task loading. A normal diver only has to focus on air, direction, and time. A scientific diver has to focus on whatever they’re surveying, have perfect trim, the normal diving things, as well as an increased safety standard. Since it's regulated by OSHA it's all very above board and official. Not a single factor is left out of a briefing.
The exciting things didn’t happen until the second week. We were camping in Big Sur: no cell service, no rinse station, no direct road access. The first day when we dove, it didn’t go well. The conditions were too murky to actually see past our fins and the waves were too large for us to see the base of our fins. As a result, the next dive, we drove up the road to the Monastery Beach in Carmel. There we were able to do our skills a lot easier with a much better viz. We learned skills like surveying the terrain, identifying fish and species, swimming through kelp forest and identifying kelp. Overall, it was a great experience for me. I learned lots from the mentors who were there, like the head of the UC dive department. I had a lot of fun and learned a lot. In hindsight, this is better than whatever research I would have done over the summer.
