It's been pretty full on. Both of my courses went really well. I had Brandon, who I mentored through his Dive Master Training and has now qualified as an Instructor a couple of months ago. He was "Team Teaching" with me...
I must say that of all the Team teaching I've done with new Instructors, he's been by far the best and apart from a few tweaks here and there, he did a brilliant job. I really took a back seat and let him run things his way, to a degree :-D ..It's all well and good team teaching to pick up hints and tips from different instructors but having to teach without any back up is a totally different ball game.
Anyway, Open Water finished I was then scheduled for an Advanced course. I only had three students, one English, Canadian and a guy from the States ..all really nice but odd (special) in their own way.
Day 1 on the course we did a Navigation dive which they have to use a compass, navigating reciprocal heading, navigate a square and count/time kick cycles ...I briefed the dive very well, twice in fact, on land and on the boat ..but ended up being rather chaotic. Blank stares not knowing what to do even when i had everything written on a slate ..argh!!!! Peak performance buoyancy on the other hand was great and they all enjoyed it no end and actually understood what they were supposed to be doing.
Day 2, started well and ended well with their first dive being a Deep Dive to 30m, all good, only issue was with one of the guys masks pressing on his bridge of his nose too much, but that was only because he had an odd shaped face and none of the masks on board fit him and as he dived it was bruising and getting even bigger ...shouldn't laugh but it was rather funny. Anyway, moving on, their 4th dive was the Wreck, visibility wasn't good, around 5 meters and we headed down the line which led directly to the bow of the HTMS Sattakut, WWII ship, 45m long, sank in 2011. 10 or so minutes into the dive, I passed my torch to each of the students so that they could have a peek in, then continued the dive to the back of the boat, where there is a massive gun. Looking back I had only one student ..great! ...I then swam back with him to find a few meters away, Jessica and then signaled where is your buddy? She gave me her usual blank look JOY!!!!
I got the 2 student to hold onto a line and told them to wait there, whilst I searched for 1 minute. Martin, the one with the mask issue couldn't have gone far ..it had only been, maybe 15/20 seconds. Swiftly retracing my path, he was no where to be seen. I went back to my 2 students and signaled to go up ...
In diving, if you lose your buddy/group, you stay where you are for 1 minute and then slowly go up to the surface if your not found, which is briefed on EVERY dive. So we surfaced and Martin was nowhere to be seen. I sent the 2 students back to the boat and notified surface cover who looked for bubbles ..on spotting some just by me, I dove down only to find another group. Visibility was bad and I surfaced again. Still no Martin. Argh, by this time I was getting worried. Fortunately another group on the boat surfaced and I grabbed the dive leader as a buddy and two other Instructors on the boat kitted up and jumped in to search for Martin. One team searched the port side whilst the other two searched the starboard. By this time I was pooping myself, thinking of all the different scenario's that could have happened. Did I brief properly? Did he get stuck? Is he unconscious? Has he run out of air? Something seriously bad must have happened seeing he didn't surface after a minute ...
10 mins of searching which seemed a lifetime we called it off as our bottom time (NDL's) were running very low. We surfaced and I was just praying that he'd appeared. Shouting from the boat 'He's OK' ..he surfaced with another group ..Oh my goodness ...I was so relieved ...angry too ..when I shouted at him 'what the hell do you think you were doing? what about the 1 minute rule?' he apologized and made out that he thought he was only supposed to stay still for a minute ...it could have gone oh so wrong ..DONKEY!!!!
1 comment:
Phew! What a relief for you Jen!
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