Day 209! So I wasn’t necessarily supposed to assist another rescue course… but here we are! One of our DMTs who was supposed to assist, Sina, has to unfortunately sit out from diving for a couple of days (due to some health reasons). The course needed a DMT assistant and Kit had his day off today, which left me! I’m not opposed to assisting, it’s the fun side of the course, it’s just going to be two long and intense days!

I woke up this morning at 8am! Because I was assisting another stress and rescue course, I had to attend class at 9am. But that meant I got to sleep in a bit longer than usual.

I got ready for my day and made my way over to Taco Shack for a familiar breakfast, a muesli bowl!

I’ve missed having this for breakfast since I’ve been diving in the mornings, so it was a nice treat!

9am rolled around and it was time for class. The stress and rescue course was being taught by one of our instructors, Guada. This was her first time teaching the course! There were two people actually taking the course, Sophia a traveler wanting to do their DMT back home and Chris our newest DMT.

We sat through Guada talking for about an hour and a half. She discussed all the different signs of stress, how to act, panic situations, and the goals of the course.

Todays dives were going to be practicing our open water skills in neutral buoyancy (not touching the ground) and a few other skills. The second dive was going to be a semi Hell dive… but more on that soon.

Class finished up and we had lunch with the instructors before heading out to dive!

Today was finally a sunny day! Well at least for the beginning of it. We tried going to Aow Leuk for the first dive but it was too windy so we boated around to the opposite side of the island. We circled the entire island today unintentionally.

We started out diving at Mango Bay. Before we got to diving though, I had to pretend to be a distressed snorkeler on the surface. So at random points before we got into the water, I’d hurl myself off the boat and call for Tacos (our code word for help, to not sound the alarms).

After doing this a few times, we dove in and did some surface skills which included, towing a tired diver, taking on and off equipment, etc.

Then we descended and did our open water skills. I did them at the same time as Guada and then watched Chris do them while she watched Sophia. These skills took a while and a couple of them require to go up to the surface… which by this time had become much colder and sadly, rainy.

We finished off our first dive with a short dive to the boat. Mainly because it was warmer under water but also it’s a bit faster.

Our second dive was at White Rock and by this point the waves were getting pretty big. We scrapped some of the skills for the second dive and went straight into doing the mini Hell dive. The reason this isn’t a full hell dive is because nothing is going wrong with the divers, everything is going wrong with Guada and I. The divers goal is to help fix our problem and react right to the problem.

Last time I assisted, I had to participate in this for a bit as well. But this time, I was just a problem diver.

I was ripping my own mask off and throwing it away, dropping my regulator out of my mouth, pretending I was negatively buoyant, losing fins, asking for air, taking all of my equipment off whatever I could do to cause problems and stress.

Sometimes, I’d even toss both my mask and regulator and they had to come save me… not only was I doing this to cause problems, but I wanted to push my own comfort zone of these situations. Last assist, I didn’t really want to take my mask off as one of the problems… but today I proved to myself I’m totally okay with it. It’s pretty crazy how much more comfortable I am with diving, especially in this type of situation.

This lasted around 20 minutes before we cut it off and just enjoyed the rest of our dive.

We headed back to Taco and I immediately went home to shower. My tattoo is unfortunately getting a number of ingrown hairs and I wanted to keep them clean… I guess when you don’t shave your leg for 26 years this happens.

I then met up with Kit, Lydia, Sina, and Chris for dinner! Lydia isn’t in training any more, but she hasn’t left the island yet, so she’s of course still a part of the team. It was nice to have just a DMT dinner and hang out. Chris brought up playing a game where we each write a person/celebrity and we all have to guess who we were. It was a really fun and goofy game, and great for waiting for our food.

We weren’t at Mama Tams, but Chris told me the fried chicken here rivaled it, so I of course had to try it. He wasn’t wrong, it was really good, but I do love Mama’s fried chicken a lot. We ended up hanging out for a couple of hours. It was a really really nice night of laughing and good chit chat.

I’m very happy to have such great people on our team and that we get along so well!

I finished off my night with a FaceTime with my parents! Our weekly chats are always a highlight and I’m really glad the technology exists for us to be able to basically chat face to face.

I then chatted with my friend Dylan for a little bit while he made his way to work! It makes me so happy when friends from home reach out. I miss them a lot.

Tomorrow I’ll be leading my first fun diver by myself! I’ll also be finishing out the rescue course in the afternoon, so that means it’s time for another double boat!

– Elie