There is a version of your first dive that lives in the course materials, and there is the one that actually happens. The two overlap less than you would think, and none of the differences are problems - they are just things nobody mentions.
1. Your own breathing is deafening
For the first two minutes it is all you can hear and it sounds wrong. It is not wrong. By minute five you will have stopped noticing, and by the end of the dive you will find it calming enough that people buy meditation apps that imitate it.
2. You will be over-weighted
Almost everybody is on dive one, because an instructor would rather you sank than floated on your first descent. Dive three is where your weighting gets honest, and the difference in how the dive feels is enormous.
3. Twelve metres does not feel deep
It feels like being in a large swimming pool with better decoration. The number on your gauge and the sensation have almost nothing to do with each other, which is exactly why the gauge exists.
4. Nobody looks up
New divers stare at the reef, which is fair - it is what they came for. Roll onto your back for ten seconds. The surface from underneath, with the light coming through it, is the image most people remember a year later.
5. Equalising is a rhythm, not an event
Do it before it hurts, every metre, all the way down. If you wait until you feel pressure you have already waited too long.
6. The mask skill is worse in your head
Removing your mask underwater is the skill students dread all week. It takes four seconds and the water is 29 degrees. The dread is the hard part.
7. You will use more air than everybody
New divers breathe fast because they are excited and moving inefficiently. Your consumption drops by roughly a third over your first twenty dives without you doing anything deliberate about it.
8. Fish do not care about you
You are a large, slow, noisy thing that is clearly not hunting. Stay still for thirty seconds and the reef simply resumes.
9. You will be exhausted afterwards
Between the adrenaline, the sun, the salt and the breathing, a first dive takes more out of you than an hour of exercise. Plan nothing for the afternoon.
10. You will want to go again immediately
Which is the actual reason we wrote this list.
Where to do it
Any of these run first dives with an instructor one-to-one:
