Our motorboat arrived at a giant wooden brick that was apparently the main diving vessel. We clambered aboard, and with a shiver it chugged in to life before heading out to deeper waters. In diving you always have to dive with a buddy, in case you panic or anything - they can give you a slap and tell you to pull yourself together.
That day I buddied up with an English guy called Jack, we checked our equipment over, had a final group talk and all too soon the boat arrived at the first dive site. I donned my fins and with a great deal of trepidation clumsily flapped over to the rear of the boat, and launched myself into the water.
My first dive in the sea! We weren't going deep: only 9 meters, but it felt a lot to me as I caught sight of the the dim ocean floor looming way below. As your body gets under pressure you being to feel a 'sqeeze', where the little pockets of air inside you get pressurised - especially in your ears. You have to equalise this pressure, by blowing on your nose, swallowing or wiggling your jaw about. And so that is how I descended: inching down the buoy rope frantically swallowing, waggling my jaw about and blowing on my nose. I took so long that Steve the instructor, and all the dive master helpers swam over to check that I was ok. We eventually all made it to the bottom, and practiced all of the techniques we had learned in the pool. I didn't really get a chance to look about too much - focused as I was on not messing up.
Tony seemed to be coping fine, despite the fear he had told us about yesterday. However that evening he did confess he'd found it hard, and that he wasn't sure he could finish the course. I attempted to persuade him to stick with it to the end, being that it was only 3 days, and he had already done one of them.
The next day was rather boring and contained no dives. We were just sat in classroom, learning theory.
The day after that was the last of the course. We went on a few more dives, getting familiar with how the whole diving thing worked, and to demonstrate a couple of skills that weren't too simple. The first was that I had to take all off all of my equipment and put it on again. The second was a simulation of being out of air. Or to put it another way: drowning. To do this I had to take off my mask, and Steve the instructor turned off my air. Very suddenly I could not breathe at all. I frantically batted at him to let him know I was suffocating, and he let the air flow again. Thinking about it I'm not sure if that part was actually part of the course at all, and was in fact just Steve getting some twisted kick out of torturing us.
This was probably the hardest part of the course, and to make sure that Tony could do it Steve yet again deployed Daphne the pretty dive master to do the skill demonstration individually with him. He did so admirably, even somehow managing to puff out his chest a little at the same time.
At midday we were brought back to land. That was the end of the practical side of the course. In the afternoon we sat the exam. Although to say exam would be a bit of an exaggeration. There were questions to answer, sure, with multiple choice answers - except that Daphne the dive master was in the room with us, and as soon as we didn't know an answer we asked her and she just told us. Unsurprisingly everyone passed. Nobody was more happy about this than Tony.
Rob and I had already signed up to go on to complete the advanced course as well. Tony felt that this would be a little much so did not decide to join us on that venture. The only issue was that the advanced course was scheduled to start the day after the exam. There were a few people in the same boat (pardon the pun) and everybody agreed that it was a little "full on", to start the day after. With a little persuading we managed to get Steve the instructor to let us all have the day off. He agreed, and so that meant party times ahoy.
That day I buddied up with an English guy called Jack, we checked our equipment over, had a final group talk and all too soon the boat arrived at the first dive site. I donned my fins and with a great deal of trepidation clumsily flapped over to the rear of the boat, and launched myself into the water.
My first dive in the sea! We weren't going deep: only 9 meters, but it felt a lot to me as I caught sight of the the dim ocean floor looming way below. As your body gets under pressure you being to feel a 'sqeeze', where the little pockets of air inside you get pressurised - especially in your ears. You have to equalise this pressure, by blowing on your nose, swallowing or wiggling your jaw about. And so that is how I descended: inching down the buoy rope frantically swallowing, waggling my jaw about and blowing on my nose. I took so long that Steve the instructor, and all the dive master helpers swam over to check that I was ok. We eventually all made it to the bottom, and practiced all of the techniques we had learned in the pool. I didn't really get a chance to look about too much - focused as I was on not messing up.
Tony seemed to be coping fine, despite the fear he had told us about yesterday. However that evening he did confess he'd found it hard, and that he wasn't sure he could finish the course. I attempted to persuade him to stick with it to the end, being that it was only 3 days, and he had already done one of them.
The next day was rather boring and contained no dives. We were just sat in classroom, learning theory.
The day after that was the last of the course. We went on a few more dives, getting familiar with how the whole diving thing worked, and to demonstrate a couple of skills that weren't too simple. The first was that I had to take all off all of my equipment and put it on again. The second was a simulation of being out of air. Or to put it another way: drowning. To do this I had to take off my mask, and Steve the instructor turned off my air. Very suddenly I could not breathe at all. I frantically batted at him to let him know I was suffocating, and he let the air flow again. Thinking about it I'm not sure if that part was actually part of the course at all, and was in fact just Steve getting some twisted kick out of torturing us.
This was probably the hardest part of the course, and to make sure that Tony could do it Steve yet again deployed Daphne the pretty dive master to do the skill demonstration individually with him. He did so admirably, even somehow managing to puff out his chest a little at the same time.
At midday we were brought back to land. That was the end of the practical side of the course. In the afternoon we sat the exam. Although to say exam would be a bit of an exaggeration. There were questions to answer, sure, with multiple choice answers - except that Daphne the dive master was in the room with us, and as soon as we didn't know an answer we asked her and she just told us. Unsurprisingly everyone passed. Nobody was more happy about this than Tony.
Rob and I had already signed up to go on to complete the advanced course as well. Tony felt that this would be a little much so did not decide to join us on that venture. The only issue was that the advanced course was scheduled to start the day after the exam. There were a few people in the same boat (pardon the pun) and everybody agreed that it was a little "full on", to start the day after. With a little persuading we managed to get Steve the instructor to let us all have the day off. He agreed, and so that meant party times ahoy.
No comments:
Post a Comment