PADI - Cake
As of Sunday, Jessica and I are both certified PADI Open Water Divers. We completed our open water dives at Pearl Lake in South Benoit, IL - an overpriced campground with a lake for beach activities on one side and scuba on the other. I guess there really isn’t much competition for good dive sites around Illinois. You just have to find a relatively clean lake, throw a twin engine plane, a sub, a couple boats, and bunch of other random objects on the bottom (we did our training on top of a submerged school bus), and you can charge whatever you want. The divers will still come.
We passed the class without any trouble, although scuba diving is much more dangerous than I originally assumed. I would recommend that anyone interested in scuba diving on a vacation get the certification beforehand.
We did some diving of our own on Sunday afternoon. After entertaining ourselves for about 20 minutes feeding bluegill at a depth of 30 feet, I realized we’re in for quite a treat when we hit the Great Barrier Reef.