2 days until my first Open Water course - stress!
I had an excellent response to the email I sent out advertising my diving courses at the start of last week. So, I’ve spent almost all of my free time out of lessons sending emails to people and trying to schedule everything to fit everyone. Man, this admin and logisital stuff is enough to take you to an early grave… and I’ve not even taught a course yet! My first course is still a week away and it’s stressful! I’m sure once I’ve done the first few courses, they’ll become a lot less stressful. But I’m wanting to make sure I dot every “i” and cross every “t”. Am even sending emails to PADI Americas about standards and procedures, getting w couple of things confirmed. It’s strange - when it comes to answering questions about standards, their response was almost immediate; but when it comes to processing instructor applications, they seem to go at a pace akin to a special olypmics hurdler. Speaking of, let me just go and send them an email reminder…
Right - hopefully that’ll get em into action and processing my applications. We can but hope. So last Wednesday night I met up with the victims… sorry, people who will have the honour of being my first dive students. I’ll be teaching them an Open Water course and it all starts on Wednesday with the knowledge review sessions. They continue on Thursday and on Saturday we move to the pool for our confined water dives. On Saturday afternoon I’m doing an Advanced Open Water course, and that will continue on Sunday morning. Then on Sunday afternoon and Monday I’ll finish up my Open Water students. No rest for the wicked!
Had a good weekend of diving though. On Saturday I dived the USS Emmons - a WWII ship that was sunk during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. It is just about the only wreck around Okinawa that is diveable, and is a great piece of history. It’s also an official war grave, and has bodies still inside it which haven’t been retrieved. The dive’s at 30-45m and is an amazing sight to behold. Diving from fore to aft, thoughts raced through my head about the final moments onboard this ship, how the crew and captain must have felt when they realised it was going to sink etc. Unfortunately, because of the depth you can only spend around 15 minutes going round the wreck and then you have to come up slowly, making plenty of safety stops along the way. One guy was using a drop tank at 5m for his safety stop, but when he got to the surface his tank pressure was 1/2 bar (700 psi). He was joking about it but finishing with so little air is suicidal. That’s even less than atmospheric pressure at the surface! If he’d have had any problems at all he’d have been in a world of trouble. Made sure I finished with a nice reserve and dived as safely as you can. I also got some pretty good pics of the ship which I’ll post in the next coupld of days.
Yesterday morning I did a mini scuba review with one of my ex teaching colleagues. She’s going to Australia in winter and wants to dive, but since she got her certification a couple of years ago, has done virtually no dives. She was pretty calm and confident in the water (surprisingly so). I just did a few skills with her due to time constraints, but once we’ve done a couple more dives she’ll be fine to dive with a buddy again. Then yesterday afternoon I finally met one of the new teachers who’s also a Divemaster. We did 2 dives at Maeda & Kadena, and I really enjoyed them. We saw a couple of cuttlefish as well as the usual suspects. Really got on well with this girl too - hopefully we’ll get to dive together regularly. Since Lindsey’s left, I’m back to only a couple of consistent dive buddies. Once I get some students certified, I’m sure I’ll be able to get them to come out with me.
Well, that’s about it for now. I’ll be uploading some photos from the Emmons in the very near future. Until then, take care and dive safely.
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