There were but­ter­flies in my stomach.

I for­got every­thing the instruc­tor told me the day before. And there was quite a lot of it.

The vast sight of the end­less ocean is enough to get even an expert swim­mer ner­vous, I’ve heard. So I took con­so­la­tion in the fact that I’m not even an expert.

The end­less ocean stretches out into the horizon

The blue green shim­mer­ing sea beckons

Yes, I know how to swim. In a pool, I could prob­a­bly save a life too. But here, many miles from the shore, in the mid­dle of a shim­mer­ing blue green ocean, and a boat which was sway­ing with the waves, the slight panic was unavoid­able. It was fear, mixed with a height­ened sense of anticipation.

I’ve never actu­ally jumped into the ocean before. I’ve frol­icked with the waves, like every­one does when they go to a beach. But jump and swim? Never. And jump and dive? Ditto!

Even with a life jacket tied firmly and an instruc­tor who kept telling me to breathe nor­mally, I had my doubts.

But… there I was! Out in the ocean some­where off the Andaman islands. In a boat in the mid­dle of nowhere. And I’d paid quite a bit to get there.

And that’s how my ocean bath hap­pened. Watch­ing the ocean bath in Cintol’s “Alive is Awe­some” series, I can now say that I did it too.

Get­ting ready for the jump!

What a feeling!

It was def­i­nitely an expe­ri­ence to remem­ber. The instruc­tors checked if the life jack­ets are tied prop­erly. Whether the oxy­gen tanks were full and work­ing. And then, the boat was teth­ered to the depth of the ocean. It was time.

I must admit (much as I’d like to say I was very brave and didn’t feel an iota of fear) that it wasn’t my most con­fi­dent moment. But it was def­i­nitely my “alive is awe­some” moment. You know the feel­ing? When there’s fear, but the antic­i­pa­tion of the larger expe­ri­ence takes over. I let go of the safety of the rock­ing boat, I looked around one time at the mighty ocean, at my smil­ing instruc­tor and took the plunge.

Next, was the big splash as I entered the water and then went under, let­ting out my breath the entire time. The water wasn’t as cold as it looked, in fact it was quite warm in those trop­i­cal climes. A few sec­onds later, I was back with my head out of the water and sud­denly every­thing looked well again in the world. I was afloat and I could see the oth­ers head­ing towards the rope.

The very rope which we were going to use to lower our­selves into the ocean. But that is a dif­fer­ent story, already told in this tale about my Andamans experience.

The warm trop­i­cal waters makes it eas­ier when you jump!

Jump­ing into the waters, this first dive into the ocean, get­ting engulfed by the waves gave me the feel­ing of how “tiny” I was in the mid­dle of this end­less ocean. But there is only one word that can describe what I felt when I jumped and emerged out of the water… alive!

Mak­ing our way through the waters

Alive is awesome!

ALSO READ
– Come with me as I expe­ri­ence the vil­lage bath expe­ri­ence, the antic­i­pa­tion of first rain, the ele­phant bath, the “ice-ice” baby feel­ing and the cold moun­tain water cross­ing experience!

This is a part of the Alive is Awe­some cam­paign from Godrej Cinthol. For fun con­tests and the lat­est visu­als swing by this page).

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