After eight pool dives and two open water dives on our first full day in Osa, we staggered down to the dining pavilion after another ridiculously early wakeup for the third and fourth ocean dives and – hopefully – our certification as fully-qualified PADI open water divers.

Full disclosure: the dives are such a blur in my memory, and the photos so mingled, that I am not 100% sure these are all from the second day of diving. Just go with it – and if it feels a little mixed up, well, that was the experience. I was really just trying to not die, okay? But I do know that the above selfie was from the second day of diving, taken while I clung to the anchor line and waited for Steve to fix a mask issue and descend to meet me. Also full disclosure: I did not mean to take this selfie; it was an accident.

I think it was the second day that I figured out I could hook my camera’s wrist strap to my BCD buckle. Game. Changed.

Dive buddy!

So much fun exploring below the waves with this guy. I can’t wait for our next dive adventure – more about that soon.

Also can’t say enough about what a wonderful divemaster and guide Quique was. I know I already waxed lyrical about his bubble-blowing and wildlife-spotting skills, and how safe we felt in the water with him. The only downside is that he set such a high bar that we’ll be measuring every future divemaster against him.

(That’s Quique’s fin in the upper left corner. See what I meant about his perfect buoyancy? No one else could get that close to the coral and never touch it. Amazing.)

While we were diving, all I could hear was the sound of my own breath – a long breath in, followed by a very bubbly exhale. But when we surfaced between the two dives of the day, Garry asked: “Did you hear all that noise?” Donna and I shook our heads and looked confused, but Steve said he had heard it – something like a shrill squeaking call? Quique and the boat captain told us that there were false killer whales in the area (!!!!!) and we’d been hearing them – sometimes faint, sometimes much louder/closer. Except that Donna and I hadn’t heard them at all. We got echolocated, and we didn’t even know it.

To be fair, I was a little distracted by something else that happened on the second day.

Quique had us swimming around a couple of tall, coral-encrusted rock formations and through a narrow-ish “swim-through” formation, when suddenly we were surrounded by a school of hundreds – maybe thousands – of fish.

Being surrounded by fish was exactly what I was worried about – that was what had made me panic when snorkeling. But my neoprene theory held true, and I surprised myself, again, by being totally at peace. I just floated in place, looked at the fish – and even took pictures.

Most of the fish didn’t get close to us. As Donna said, they were thinking “Let’s just get away from these sea lions – or dolphins – or whatever these large mammals are that look like they might eat us.” But knowing that they were not interested in getting up in my grill doesn’t mean believing it in the moment – so I was really pleased and proud of myself that being surrounded by fish didn’t bother me. (Thank you, neoprene!)

Steve and I demonstrated a few more skills for Quique (while Garry and Donna followed his direction to “swim around that rock and then come back”) and before I was ready to say goodbye to the underwater world, we were ascending, making our safety stop, and breaking the surface of the dive site. Back at the dock, Quique told us that we were naturals and had passed our skills with flying colors, and that we were now certified to dive as deep as eighteen meters – the deepest we’d gone in the two days. We sat with Garry and Donna late into the night (even knowing we all had an extra-early wake-up call the next morning) going over every moment of the four dives. The false killer whales that had echolocated us without Donna or me noticing a thing. The stingray’s threat display from the first day. The school of fish that surrounded us. The narrow swim-through. The reef sharks that we saw both days (I got video!) and all the sea turtles. Donna marveled that we had seen every animal I said I wanted to see, and made me promise to bring my magic wildlife summoning powers to Corcovado National Park the next day.

I was the one who wanted to get scuba certified, but I surprised myself by loving it as much as I did. Steve and I agreed – we couldn’t wait for our next dive adventure, although we didn’t know when or where that would be. (We had the added complication of needing to arrange childcare in order to go diving – something Garry and Donna gleefully were not contending with themselves.) We know where our next dives are coming from now, so keep watching this space for more salty content in the next few months – but first, we may have been saying goodbye to the underwater world but there was a lot more of Costa Rica to explore!

Next week: a short hike to a beautiful beach.