In order to be prepared for my internship (which begins on monday!) I needed to get my Advanced and Rescue diver certifications. So I decided to first go to St. Maarten to take those courses and have some fun doing amazing dives while I'm at it! 

My mom used to dive a lot and she thought it would be fun to take a vacation and come along with me to get back into diving!  We were looking at our Basic Open Water SCUBA certification cards and noticed that we were both 19 years old when we took the course and we were both certified on August 12th, exactly 30 years apart.  My mom was certified on August 12th, 1977 and I was certified on August 12th, 2007! Coincidence? I'll leave that up to you to decide  :) 

     

This is right after she left me alone with a shark!  We were taking turns swimming up to the ladder to get on the boat one at a time and my mom and I were the last two left under the boat when a caribbean reef shark swam towards us out of the blue.  My mom made a biting motion with her hand and then pointed to me as if to say "he's going to eat you!" and then took off for the ladder. She's such a protective mother. She climbed up and then for a moment it was just me suspended in mid water alone watching this shark.  It was actually a really cool, peaceful moment I was grateful to have. Thanks Mom!

We were lucky to find the Ocean Explorers Dive center.  The team working there is amazing.  I learned so much from them and had a blast while doing it.  They are a great group of fun, intelligent, hard working people. Thank you Jef, Astrid, Shane, and Lu! 

Ocean Explorers Dive Center, St. Maarten

They've got a pretty sweet location right on the beach

Gearing up!

So now I'm a certified Rescue diver and ready to start my internship with STENAPA! I fly to Statia tomorrow and my Mom flies back to Rhode Island.  Our wonderful, action-packed little vacation is coming to an end, but my adventure is just beginning!  I do not know how often I will have access to internet on Statia, but I will do my best to keep updating this site.  Thanks for checking it out!

(to view the dive video on the previous post, made by my instructor Jef, just copy and paste the link)

xoxo