Under the Sea

The closer you look at God's creation, the more detail and design that you see. The beauty and creativity that God gave to his underwater creation gives Him glory and pleasure. I have a much fuller understanding of why, after creating the sea and all that lives in it, He said, "It is good."

Over the past month, Annmarie and I have been training for our underwater scuba diving certification. Our dive instructor is Alex, a retired IDF, who has a passion for diving and stopped recording his dives after he reached 5,000. He began our lessons in the Marine pool where we learned how to put together and use our equipment, solve problems with our equipment while underwater, use our BCD and lungs to control our buoyancy, buddy breathe, etc. It's very hard to practice buddy breathing while you're above water, by the way, because you(I) forget that in a real case scenario, you'd be underwater and unable to breathe inbetween sharing your regulator with your buddy. Annmarie and I were standing in the shallow end as Alex explained how to hold on to your buddy and your regulator and pass it from your mouth to your buddy's as each takes a couple breaths. Ready and prepared, I held on to Annmarie's BCD, grabbed my regulator, and took a couple breaths before reaching it to her mouth to give her a turn to breathe. I stood there, calmly breathing through my nose, trying not to play footsie (flipsie) with our long flippers, and waiting for her to take a couple breaths before I could take the regulator back.
"Are you breathing?" Annmarie demanded, the regulator dropping from her mouth as she burst out laughing. "You're supposed to be underwater - you can't breathe while I'm using your regulator." We started laughing so hard that Alex made us practice underwater where you definitely don't forget that you can't breathe through your nose while your buddy is using your regulator.

After a weekend of training in the Marine pool where the only things to look at were a shekel, a lost silver earring, and chipped pool tiles, we went down to Eilat to practice the open water part of our certification. The harsh beauty of the desert we drove through on the way down was as beautiful, in a totally different way, as the fish and the coral. These pictures are of that desert and the bedouins and their camels that inhabit it. We stopped to take a picture of a herd of camels just off the highway, and a young boy who was watching them, rode up to us on his donkey asking for food. He rode away again, happily munching on some bananas and apples from our well-stocked snack supply.