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GamePlan's Open Water Check Out Dive A refresher course on Love. Team GamePlan went to Aquaventure Reef Club in Anilao, Batangas on the first weekend of Feb for producers Camille, Karen, Gie, and Ramil’s check out dive. Yippee! It was also Ramil’s birthday, so that made it extra special. I was supposed to be part of the batch if it wasn’t for my migraines last December, but I still had a blast skin diving and playing with the bubbles of the scuba divers. Haha! Those bubbles looked so pretty from the surface. It was like being inside a screensaver! Joy, Gretch and Carlo dove with the gang in Mainit Reef. Tantan was the newbies’ dive instructor, Buko our kulit underwater cameraman, and Ogs the dive master, and I followed them and their bubbles until they disappeared into 60 feet of dark blue. I was already so far from the bangka that I almost got run over by one! On my way back, struggling against the current, I saw a puffer fish, a porcupine fish, a moray eel, and a university of barracudas that freaked me out. The divers, however, had a really good dive, especially the first timers. They saw five white tip sharks, the same school of barracudas, and lots of pretty corals that they recognized from the diving footage in the office. The veteran divers thought that the checkout was too good to be true. I figured God must’ve said, "Hey, let’s give these kids a break," and he sent all those beautiful creatures to Mainit Reef. For their second dive, we went to Cathedral. It’s called Cathedral because there’s a stone cross at the bottom. Again I wasn’t able to follow them all the way down, but the crew and I saw an eagle ray swim by our bangka. At the bottom, the divers fed the fish and according to them, the fish were really matakaw. When Tantan and the 4 students ascended, I got to play around with the veterans down below. I was making sisid ala-Muro Ami and waving at them, and when I went up for air, Carlo and Buko taught me how to breathe from their octopus regulators. So I put the mouthpiece of Carlo’s reg into my mouth and held his and Buko’s hands so that I could descend with them. It was difficult for me since I didn’t have any weights on, nor did I have a gas tank, but I flipped my fins and went as deep as I could and the experience was like being kidnapped by mermen with Part of Your World playing in the background. It was really fun and I found breathing underwater way cool. I felt like my dream of becoming an aquanaut was close to coming true, until I felt the squeeze. I had to equalize the painful pressure in my ears and in order to do that, you’ve to ascend a little and suspend yourself until the pressure lessens. But I was so buoyant without the weights that staying at almost 8 feet below was too exhausting. So I left Carlo’s side and sped to the surface for air. Back at the beach, we freshened up and collected our experiences and we definitely felt a good change in ourselves and in the team. We finally found one sport that we could do together and it was an enriching and fulfilling sport where competition was not a factor at all. We also found the reason why we do what we do for a living. The night before, we had what we call Planning. Every department has Planning where the employees evaluate the previous year and make plans for the year to come. In many ways, 2002 was a good year. We got a lot of projects for the company and we still have faithful clients who believe in what we deliver. But 2002 was also very difficult with seasonal burnouts and shoots that required so much physical strength that we ended up sick the next day. Frankly, I felt that my body was giving up on me. In this shoot, however, we not only learned how to scuba dive. We got a refresher course on how to live the GamePlan lifestyle, and we were reminded of why we chose to work for this show: Love, baby! We love our show. We love sports, we love the outdoors, we love our stories, and we love each other. It’s all for one and one for all. We’re working to keep the show alive, to keep the team together and, as Gretchen would put it, to save the world through sports. Haha! *I was the official team photographer. Pictures with the GAMEPLAN logo are video stills taken from the raw footage of Buko Raymundo. :)
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