PADI IDC Countdown - 14 days to go (plus manta stories in this episode!)
Oh. My. God. It’s only 14 days until I head to Thailand and begin my own preparation for my PADI IDC. It’s just hit me today that I have no time at all to study everything! Am getting a little more nervous about it now, especially as this week I’ve had zero time to study at work. I’ve been marking tests all day and then busy in the evenings. When you get in at midnight, 14 hours after you left the house, you’re not really in the frame of mind to go and stick your head into a dive manual for an hour or so.
As I said before, the model lessons and presentations aren’t really worrying me. I’m a teacher by trade and so should be able to do that without any serious problems. The written tests are just a matter of learning the stuff from the Encyclopedia, and getting the standards and everything out of the instructor manual. I’ll have ample time in the pre-IDC prep course to work on my demonstration skills, and get them right up to scratch. The only worry I have is having to do a rescue demonstration or similar. As PADI are changing the standards and criteria for the IE at the moment, and are including more things from the DM and Rescue Diver courses. So if you take the IE, and get asked to do a presentation on the Buhlmann dive model, don’t say I didn’t warn you!
Next item on the agenda is my couple of dives at Maeda on Wednesday. The visibility was pretty poor and we didn’t go deep, but the dives will stick in the memory for a long time to come. Got into the water at about 7pm and it felt so good to get in due to the heat of the day. Yesterday, according to the weather forecast it felt like 40C with the humidity. For those of you who still work in Fahrenheit then I’ll translate – that is hella-hot! So we got in and decided to head left along the wall which drops down to about 35m. My buddy had ear equalisation problems though so we stayed at around 10-12m. We’d been swimming along for about 5 minutes when I looked down into the depths, and saw a movement at about 20m. I looked more closely, and saw the movement was 3 mantas, swimming one behind the other. They looked like they could have been a family, with the biggest at the front and the smallest (the baby?) at the back. I got my buddy’s attention using my H2YO noisemaker (very distinctive rattle, and reasonably priced!!!) and made sure she saw it too. That was pretty special as it was only the 2nd time I’d seen a manta in Oki, following from the one in my previous dive. However, there was more to come.
After the mantas had gone out of view, we carried on swimming along the reef. About 2-3 minutes later, I looked down again (I was trying to see more cool stuff in the depths). This time my eyes flicked over a shape down there. I quickly stopped and got my buddy’s attention. Then the shape came into view more clearly. It was a manta, heading slowly up the reef wall… directly at me!!! I waited there for a while just staring at it and it’s graceful ascent. After a while though I realised it had no intention of diverting from its path! To avoid any kamikaze-like attack, I swam out of its way and it slowly came up beside me. It must have been only 50cm away from me, and was probably a metre or so wide and at least that in length. It then really slowed down and I got a good close view of it. Then I breathed out and it must have suddenly realised that I was here. It glided away (I prefer to use that term with mantas – it seems much more appropriate) at the same depth as me but in the opposite direction. I couldn’t believe it, and neither could my buddy. I just did the rest of the dive with a huge grin on my face.
So I’ve got a trip to Hiroshima coming up this weekend, and will write a report of my travels when I get back. No diving this weekend anyway due to the pending typhoon so I’m not missing much here in Okinawa. More next time. Dive safely.
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