Once again I was the first one in my room to get up in the early hours of the morning. I made a quick breakfast and started cycling north to La Jolla. The ride was beautiful. Empty roads, the sun rising over the water and a fresh breeze blowing. It took about an hour to get there an I was the first one at the meeting spot of the diving school.
After everybody arrived, we changed into our diving equipment, did a short briefing and entered the water from the beach. It was crowded, surfers, scuba divers and people on the beach everywhere. When we got into the water I was surprised how warm it was. The surf here is really high and the visibility underwater was not what I was used to from diving in Tenerife. On our first dive, the Underwater Naturalist Dive, we basically just swam around in a circle, pointing out different crabs, lobsters and fish to each other. I saw a few baby manta rays and plenty of Garibaldi, the Californian State fish, a bright orange fish that looks like an XXL goldfish.
The dive experience with this diving company feels very different from the last one, 2 years ago in Tenerife. Here it feels like people are only doing the dives because they need to get the certificate. In Tenerife everyone was on vacation and did the dives for fun. That really influences the way a dive starts. All of the divers in my group are better and more experienced than me and I felt a little weird at first, getting back into it after such a long time without diving.
After the first dive I felt confident and I shot underwater photos/videos for the first time in my life which was really cool. We had about an hour between our first and second dive, the Navigation Dive. The instructors showed us how to use our compasses and gave us routes to swim underwater. Diving really isn’t just jumping into the water and swimming around for a bit. It’s much more than that and there’s a lot that you have to remember, constantly check and be aware of.
Dive 3 for that day was the Night Dive. We had to wait until the sun set, which was about 5 hours after the second dive, so I had some time to spend in La Jolla. I got some lunch and watched sea lions laying around on the rock formations by the beach. Before the Night Dive I was quite nervous, I had no idea what it would feel like not being able to see underwater at night…
When we got in, equipped with giant underwater flash lights, it was the coolest experience I’ve had in diving. The 12 of us all went down together and spent about 45 minutes at the bottom of the completely dark Pacific. Underwater life changes a lot at night. Tons of crabs came out, and at one point there was a Californian horn shark only metres away from me, suddenly showing up in the flash of my light and then disappearing back into the darkness. Luckily those sharks aren’t dangerous for humans, but thinking that anything could be right in front of you without you noticing was a truly weird thought.
I biked home after our dive for about an hour and got home pretty late and really tired from 3 hours of extreme biking, 3 very exhausting dives with heavy equipment and being up since 5 in the morning!
calitripping 
I’m sure you slept well that night!! Just the diving is exhausting, let alone the biking. I’ve done a few underwater dives. Very eery, but extremely cool since you see so many more fish and creatures that only come out at night.