I don’t know about you, but I find that my Friday nights turn into Monday mornings before I can even mutter the words ‘has anyone ordered the uber yet?’. It’s only when my weekends are jam-packed with spontaneity and a few servings of avo toast that I feel like time isn’t going by at 100mp/h.
*Enter Bucket List Diver* *and Meg’s anxiety from adventure sports*
Last Saturday, my sister and I ventured west to Fremantle for an afternoon of scuba diving with Bucket List Diver, in celebration of PADI’s International Women’s Dive Day. Now we’ve all heard of International Women’s Day – a day of empowering and reminding women to be unapologetically them. Well take that and throw on some scuba gear and you’ve got the best day on the Gregorian calendar.
When we arrived at the portside pool, we were welcomed by bright smiles from Kate and Antoni, the owners of Bucket List Diver, and the entire BLD female dive community. We soon found out that these ladies meet up once a month for cheeky weekend dive (and welcome newcomers with open arms), so we could tell we were in for a treat. After a quick lunch and celebratory pic, we got straight to learning the golden rules of scuba diving (aka not forgetting to breathe), and were in our wetsuits and strapped to oxygen tanks before we knew it.
As I’d never tried scuba diving before, I had alarm bells ringing in my head non-stop and self-doubt that wanted me out of the pool, back into my car and never to think about swimming ever again. But lucky for me, Kate was such a passionate, caring and FUN instructor, who made sure at every stage of the journey that we were all comfortable and having a good time. Plus it helped that there are usually no sharks in 3m pools.
I was an absolute hot mess for the first five minutes underwater; trying to catch my breath (despite having pure oxygen pumping into me), trying to ignore the bubbles that were launching past my ears and trying to get (and stay) in a kneeling position. Seriously, look up hot mess in the dictionary and you’d find footage of me. But it wasn’t long before my anxiety turned into adrenalin and I was ready to live out my ‘h2o: just add water’ dream.
Once all of us newbies were confident with the gear and the signals, we spent the rest of the afternoon playing like true mermaids. We swam through hoops, played all sorts of pool games and posed for pics to make our mums proud.
The day was honestly one of the best I’ve had in a while – and I truly haven’t stopped raving about it since. If you’ve always had scuba diving on your bucket list or are looking for something to do with the gals (that isn’t hiking), I couldn’t recommend Bucket List Diver enough. Kate and Antoni are such great value and the community of female divers they’ve created is a testament to that. PS. they do wayyyyy more than training in a pool, check out their full offerings, here.
