Christmas Day 2011 - we have Jen's family Christmas at Kurnell.  The weather is great and the place is packed.  I was surprised how busy it was.  We arrived about 8am and got parking but by 9am there was no parking near the park at all.

This was Jen's 100th dive and after preparing everything we got Jen's son Chris to drop us up to The Steps.  The tide was still coming in so we looked forward to a cruisy drift down to the point.  The seas were a bit bigger than I expected and it took some watching of the wave sets to get the entry right.  I went in first so that I could help Jen if she needed it.  She didn't need help getting in timing the waves fine.  We descended almost immediately and headed out towards the sand line.  Viz was OK at 7-8m and the water temp OK at 18 degrees.  There was not a lot of life around - Jen found a weedie sea dragon and we enjoyed it's company.  It's good to see them coming back again.  Past the wall we headed more south but I overshot the exit point.  Surfacing to see where we were I found we were past our exit at the point.  So we descended again and headed back and into the exit.  The waves were up so our exit was not as graceful as we would have liked but we managed it OK.  Worst part was that we hand organised a party to help carry the gear back up but they were no where to be seen.

Anyway, congratulations to Jen on her 100th dive.

After that I take Jen's son Patrick for a try dive.  We go down to the beach and Pat waits while I put a dive flag out.  I then get him to come out into the water about waste deep.  The first thing we do is practice breathing through the regulator standing up.  No problems there.  Then I get Pat to put his head in the water and breathe.  This is often a challenge for people and Pat is no exception. The natural instinct is not to breathe if your face is in water - sensible enough.  Pat found himself breathing very shallow, effectively hyperventilating.  We practice for a while.  Pat gets its after a bit - he breathes out deeply which then forces him to take a breath in.  Doing this a few times is enough to overcome the natural instinct and away we go.  Pat is grossly overweighted but we swim around with him bumping off the bottom a bit.  We spend about 30 minutes and reach a maximum depth of 5m.  Enough to get a feeling for scuba diving.  Pat is quite comfortable but admits that it was very tiring.  The tiredness is more a product of the adrenalin rush than the physical exertion.  Pat shows that he could learn to dive successfully.