Marvelous Millbrook
Quarry of our Dreams
Ongoing visits from April through November
A Real Player Movie
Click above for a Real Player movie on Marvelous Millbrook. It is only 3.5 meg large. You'll love it. Go for it. It will download, then double click on it and your Real Player will automatically open and play it for you.
And you may ask yourself, how did I get here?
In the mere few years that I have been diving, I have heard over and over how people would love to see some of the wonderful sights underwater, but are afraid to learn scuba. They are afraid of many different things, from not being able to swim strongly enough, to running out of air to being attacked by sea creatures. Let me just say that for all of the people who are afraid to dive, without a doubt, if I could do it, so can you.
When I was a kid, I had an awful lot of difficulty in and around the water. When I was very young, my mother's idea for stopping temper tantrums was to throw water in my face. This, of course, did not engender a very good feeling towards putting my face in the water. Despite this, I wanted to try to be like the other kids, and take swimming classes at the Y, and go to camp and all the rest of the water things.
My first attempts at swimming classes were absolute disasters. It seems that on top of the psychological water problem, I also had a deviated septum that loved to create differential pressure that pulled water up whenever I put my face in the water to swim. I would wind up hanging onto the side of the pool and panting for air after swallowing a few gallons of the stuff. I was always the "Charlie Brown" of the pool. It was a real drag.
Despite all of this, I had always been fascinated by the underwater world. I watched all the Jacques Cousteau shows, wondering about what it would really be like to be down under the water and shooting pictures or video of what lived down there. I thought more than once about going to scuba certification classes when I got older, but always felt that the instructors might be mean and nasty to me when they found that I only swim on my back or side and hate putting my face in the water.
I moved to Virginia in 1986, and soon after went toa dentist close to where I worked. He had lots of underwater pictures on the walls, and he told me that he was a scuba instructor, and when I finally wanted to learn how to dive, to let him know. Well, it was still a rather scary thought, and I had to be sure...
So how long does it take to be sure? 12 YEARS, that's how long! 12 years later, I finally asked Mike to teach me how to dive. He then made probably one of the worst decisions of his diving career. He said yes :-)
When I first decided I wanted to scuba dive, I had these wonderful visions of warm tropical waters, teaming with brightly colored fish, coral, happy smiling people, and beautiful calm. This was the goal when I first jumped into my swimming pool with poor Mike Hardin, whom I drove completely insane (although I fear he may have been well on the way before I ruined his life by being his worst student since the one who got stuck in the cabin cruiser, but that's a different story).
Anyway, these wonderous calm visions of beauteous marine life dissolved as I drove down to the "Caribbean North," a quarry in Haymarket, Virginia where I was to do my open water check out dives (if you can call refusing to descend for 10 minutes and freaking out an open water check out dive). I got stung by a bee, started having an allergic reaction, got nervous enough to hyperventilate, couldn't seem to get enough air out of the regulator (which was working fine, of course, just my brain wasn't) causing my poor dive buddy Christina to be exasperated with my silliness. I panicked, bolting for the surface a few times. I felt completely out of control and scared to death. Then I got eaten by an evil blue gill who drew blood and ruined my faith in cute little harmless fishies.
Just think, you go from a crystal clear and warm swimming pool, wearing hardly any weights because you're in a bathing suit, to a quarry with temperatures on the platform somewhere around 65 degrees if you are lucky. To deal with the cold, you have to wear a full farmer john and top (8 mm worth of neoprene) and then weight yourself down to counteract the floating the neoprene causes. Add to this a claustrophobia inducing thick hood, thick gloves so your fingers don't freeze off, and you have part of the picture. However, the scene is not complete without it being 97 degrees outside while you're dressed in this getup, then you have to swim on the surface about 100 yards out to the platforms before you even start to descend.
Once you start down, you find yourself hitting a thermocline or two where you gasp from the cold, overbreathe your regulator, and scare yourself half to death because you feel you are suffocating. Thus beings the fear cycle. Granted, not everyone gets this lovely terrorized feeling. I guess I'm just special.
Despite my wimpishness, I barely completed the skills and got the coveted C card. it was then that I decided I would never, EVER go near that quarry again, and would instead only dive in the wonderful waters of the Keys or the Carribean.
I lied. I ran into another dive instructor, Bob Wills, who was so impressed with my tale of woe that he made the mistake of inviting me back to the quarry fora "comfort dive." That turned into a nitrox class, which turned into an advanced class, which turned into my actually feeling good enough about diving to actually schedule a dive trip. By now I had 19 dives logged, could put on gear by myself, no longer put my wet suit on backwards, and had blue gill for breakfast. Of course, all of that was before I decided to get my dry suit checkout. The loaner suit that a friend so kindly got for me to use caused me to receive the coveted rating of Damp Suit Diver due to the neck seal not fitting my "scrawny little neck" and having enough water in my boots to take over a week to dry out the insulation. But of course, that's another story. Thanks to Judy of Brass Anchor in Frederick, Maryland for not laughing too hard.
Now that the thought of diving didn't make me curl up into a little ball whimpering and gurgling, it was time to start scheduling dive trips and getting comfortable enough diving to begin learning how to do underwater photography. From there, the bug bit, and I have a desire to TEACH underwater photography. In order to do that, however, I have to become an assistant instructor. We'll have to wait and see whether or not that goal is achieved.
Ok, didn't have to wait long. I bypassed assistant instructor and went to instructor. See the fun here.