Day 197! Not many pictures from today, since there wasn’t much to see… but with these two dives today, I have passed 90 dives! Soon enough I’ll be at 100 and that one is a very special dive. But you’ll have to wait and see what that entails later in the week!

I had another day of sleeping in today! So at 8am, I rolled out of bed and got ready for a semi-intense day.

Today, I was assisting a stress and rescue course. I took this course a few weeks ago, but this time I would be helping out with all the crazy situations… but of course experiencing some even more intense situations myself.

I went to Taco Shack and got myself a mango smoothie to kickstart my day and then it was time for class.

The classroom was an icebox, but luckily I had my trusty foot warmer Taco to help me out.

We listened to Chelsea talk about the same thing we learned from Iris when we originally took the class. It was nice to hear it all again and see how much I retained from the class the first time. Stress and rescue is a really important thing to learn and have in our toolbox JUST IN CASE anything would go wrong.

Hopefully (knock on wood) it will never ever happen!

After class, it was time to eat lunch and get ready to dive!

Todays dives would include, saving distressed snorkelers, saving distressed divers, doing all of our open water skills in neutral buoyancy, emergency assents, and a dive that would put situations in front of the rescue divers to see how they’d react to different divers being distressed under water (issues like mask, ear, equipment, etc.).

We also had to set up our equipment blindfolded in under 1.5 minutes. I was pretty stinking close to doing it, but one of my regulators was tied up in a way I couldn’t figure out blindfolded… but I was only a few seconds shy of it, I was pretty impressed with myself.

Kit and I both had to act as distressed snorkelers and Sina and Grace had to save us. We didn’t take it super hard on them since it was their first react of the course but we were splashing and flailing around to cause as much stress as we could.

Not only did they have to save us throughout the entire day… randomly Chris jumped into the water and I heard my name being called to help him.

At first I didn’t compute what was happening since Sina and Grace were the ones being mainly tested… but sure enough, it was my time to act. I quickly threw my boots, fins, and mask on and jumped into the water after throwing Chris the buoy (which he of course didn’t grab).

Chris is mischievous, as we know, and when I approached him with the buoy he descended into the water and pulled me down with him. After getting out of his reach I tried to hand him the buoy again… this time he pounced on top of me dunking me again. And then for his third act of evil he ripped off one of my fins and chucked it away.

Now… the problem with this is my fins are negatively buoyant, so they sink. So I had to quickly swim a few meters away and snag it before it descended too far into the water below. I THEN had to go back and try again. Chris wasn’t making this easy and he had no intentions to. But this time I managed to handled him onto the buoy and then he went fully limp. I had to go underneath him and drag both of us with the buoy back to the boat and then carry him back onto the boat. It was exhausting!

I found out at the end of the day, if I hadn’t handled Chris the way I had on the last time, I was in for far more dunks and problems. So I’m glad I decided to do that in the end. Apparently I was “too close” with the buoy each time. I think he was trying to have a little fun as well and stress me out.

The first dive was pretty uneventful. We did all the skills successfully, but it was really cold out. So every time we surfaced we were all shivering.

The second dive was a lot more “fun.” The start of it was Kit and I helping the problems of Chelsea and Guada as we dove around the dive site. It was intense, but I enjoyed the challenge and really worked to maintain my breathing and keep my composure. I did get a pretty good (accidental) whack in the face when Chelsea was freaking out at one point, but outside of that it went well!

Next up was Sina and Grace, who had to deal with Kit and I. We gave them all the problems like not being able to empty water from a mask, fins falling off, running out of air, being negatively or positively buoyant, etc… sometimes in quick succession. It was fun acting out the scenarios but also cool to see how quickly they could respond to the situations.

These dives worked up quite an appetite and a lot of exhaustion. So we went back to Taco Shack and I got myself a big ol’ quesadilla.

I then spent time chatting with Chris and played some pool with him as well. He showed me a list of all the things Kit and I have accomplished and what we still have to do… and we’re well over halfway through everything! Soon we’ll be leading divers and then shortly after that teaching refresher courses. Very exciting stuff! Also Chris really emphasized how much he’s enjoyed having us as dive master trainees and how happy he is with how well we’re doing!

Very nice things to hear!

I then hit the hay, because tomorrow is the hell dive day… and I’ll be experiencing it again!

– Elie