RickInOz

My brain is a little sore after being stuffed with an extraordinary amount of information in the past few days.

I have been swotting up on pressure changes with depth, residual nitrogen times, ascent rates and other mandatory knowledge before starting my scuba training. I’m due to undertake my PADI Open Water course and there is a lot to learn so it can be safe and fun. There is great potential to screw up with serious consequences so I have been paying careful attention to the pre-study material. Next week will be the practical part of the course with 5 confined water (i.e.: in the pool) and 4 open water (i.e.: in the ocean) dives, one of which will be from a boat rather than the shoreline.

As advised I have bought some gear to save having to hire equipment that has been used many times before. It hasn’t been that cheap, but hiring is a false economy as it is cheaper to buy in the long run. I’ll make sure I take a camera along for one of the open water dives so you can see me in all my gear.

Then the next bit of knowledge to acquire is related to my new job with the hospital emergency retrieval service. I’m not too worried about the actual conduct of the transfer as I’ve done it in the UK by ambulance. More so there is much to learn about how to behave when near an aircraft with moving propellers or rotors. Then we have to know where oxygen and power supplies are to plug our equipment into. Not least we will be using 2-way radios as our principal method of communication as the mobile phone network is rather patchy away from metro areas. The days of “breaker breaker” and “roger wilco” are well and truly gone. Instead there is a baffling list of acronyms and protocol. Fortunately the government, police and military are used to a degree of naivety with correct syntax.

A colleague and I took pictures of our first induction day. I’ll post these and more photos from our HUET training (you’ll have to wait to find out what this stands for) soon.