Hello

Hello everyone,
My name is Griffin. I currently live in San Diego California. To be quite honest, while this is forum dedicated to Freediving and Spearfishing, at this point I'm mostly a Scuba Diver. I've been scuba diving for a bit over a year now, but have not and will not spearfish on scuba. I have gone out once for some freediving/spearfishing, but I was having some problems with congestion that day, and thus had a horrible time trying to equalize my sinus pressure. I still enjoyed myself, though the only notable fish we saw was a yellowtail that swam through while we were just practicing freediving, before there were any guns in the water. Since then, I've been meaning to get started in freediving, but most of the finances and time that would go towards it thus far have gone to advancing my scuba diving. However, this August I'm signed up to take the FII Intermediate course in Fort Lauderdale, FL, which I expect to be a great way to get into the sport. Thus I'll be purchasing most of my freediving gear this summer, with the exception of a wetsuit for local waters and anything spearfishing related. That will come later. At this point, I already have a mask and snorkel, specifically the Sporasub Mystic mask, which I love and use for scuba diving anyways, and an IST SN-36 snorkel, for those that were interested.
For those that are curious, my username is a reference to my guitar playing, though it could be connected to my skiing as well (I've been playing guitar for 6 years, various musical instruments for 10 years, and skiing for 11 and a half). As I didn't see the announcement about not putting numbers in new usernames (here until after registering, I apologize, and if I need to change it/remove the numbers, I'll be happy to. Just tell me how.
One last thing, as per this thread, I will admit to being 16 years old, albeit only for another few months. However, having been a part of forums whether for guitar, scuba diving , or whatever else for somewhere over at least 3 years, I will say that I've generally been very hesitant to admit my age, simply because I much prefer being treated like an adult/anyone else on the forum. Thus, please don't concern yourselves too much with it.
All in all, this looks like a great community, and I'm looking forward to being part of it as I progress into freediving and spearfishing.

Thanks for the warm welcome guys. I'm pretty confident I'll take a strong liking to freediving and spearfishing both, and I already can't wait to get to FL for the FII course in a little over a month.

Interesting, thanks for the info lunker. If he's doing the Level 2 course from Aug. 14-17 in Fort Lauderdale, then it will be the same class. I'll have to ask him if I see one of his posts sometime soon as I can't PM yet.