RickInOz

After 3 weeks of planning and anticipation I started my Scuba Diving course today.

First up was a run-through of the theory. Fortunately it’s all pretty straight-forward and a lot of the knowledge required was similar to that of my anaesthetic exams. The instructor breezed through most of it quickly to get onto the important material on dive conduct.

Then we had a practical session on setting up the gear and safety drills on making sure the equipment is suitable for use.

Before long it was time to get kitted up and jump in the water. There were a lot of skills to go through and after 3 hours in and out of the water I was getting a degree of information overload. I cottoned on fairly quickly and didn’t have too many problems with the skills. The most intimidating was the simulated air depletion. For this we were at the bottom of the pool (about 3 metres) and the instructor turned off the cylinder valve. After 3 breaths I suddenly was sucking on nothing, and had to grab his spare regulator before I could breathe again. Since I knew what was coming it wasn’t too scary, but it certainly got my heart rate up a little.

We completed three out of the five pool dives and much of the theory. Tomorrow we are going for two ocean dives and the final two pool dives. Then on Wednesday we will be doing a boat dive and 2 final open water dives. After a final exam I will be a fully qualified open water diver!

I’ll try to get some pictures of us all kitted up and ready to go in the water when we do the boat dive.