IntroduceYourself - The Story of Jack (Part 1.5) - SCUBA Divemaster

Please note, that the photographs are from facebook but I'm tagged as me - the full album is public and available here:
https://www.facebook.com/pg/JHBscuba/photos/?tab=album&album_id=576416999100422
You can verify my professional diving status at:
http://www.padi.com/scuba/prochek/ (Instructor #341567)

In Part 1 of The Story of Jack: I decide to leave South Africa forever to travel the world. You can read the full post at:

https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@deimus/introduceyourself-the-story-of-jack-part-1

First, though, before we get to Part 2, at the request of @marcosespes1, I’m going to rewind a little and tell you all about how I became a SCUBA Divemaster. I’m also 100% powered up, so please support me so I can devote more time to writing. Now, back to the story:

The Story of Jack – Part 1.5 – Divemaster of the Universe

I’ve always had a passion for SCUBA and the first time I went diving I was only 10 years old. It was more than 10 years later that I did an openwater course (SSI open water) for the first time. It’s an expensive hobby and I lived in Johannesburg, very far from the sea. This meant that I was only able to dive every 2 or 3 years, which really sucked.

My interest was renewed a few years ago when a girl I was working with showed interest in doing a course. It had been more than 5 years since my last dive so I decided to join her on the course and this is when I first met my instructor, Alex.

When I decided to travel the world, I wanted to be as prepared as possible, so I joined up with the new group of DMTs (Divemaster in Training). My instructor made it clear that we were only candidates and it’s not a guaranteed qualification – if you don’t make the grade, you don’t become a divemaster.

I only had 3 months to finish a lot of courses, though, but I was determined to make it happen. Our classes were in the evenings because most of the DMTs were working full time jobs. This gave me the opportunity to get ahead of schedule and (hopefully) qualify before my flight to Thailand in January.

First up was the Advanced Diving course. This is a really rewarding course and I highly recommend it to anyone that loves SCUBA. Basically you get to choose some specialities that interest you and then you complete one dive for each discipline. There are many specialities, although not every school covers each one. Some of the more common ones are deep diving (up to 30m), night diving, underwater photography, conservation and search and recovery.

All of the training dives were done at a truly awful dive site called Miracle Waters. It’s basically a quarry with almost no fish and the only things worth seeing were sunk there to make it more interesting. There’s a small plane, a schoolbus and a helicopter – not your usual underwater attractions, for sure.

At this point, I was feeling pretty good about myself and thinking this whole divemaster thing was going to be a breeze. I couldn’t have been more wrong. After a fairly straightforward first aid course, the next course up was Rescue Diver and let me tell you, this course is no joke.

There’s a saying at my SCUBA school – “If you haven’t broken or lost any equipment, it’s not a real rescue diver course”. True enough, during the course a mask was broken, BCD damaged and a dive knife was lost.

The course teaches you how to handle a situation when things go wrong on a dive, for example how to safely help an unconscious diver to the surface. This is fairly straightforward, but things get serious when you start to handle the panicked diver scenarios.

The technique involves descending below the diver and then surfacing behind them so that you can grab their cylinder and tow them to safety. The trouble is, it’s not a real panicked diver; it’s a very experienced and highly aware instructor, who is trying to stand on your head, pull your mask off or rip the regulator out of your mouth. No easy task, I assure you.

With a renewed respect for my instructors, I finally began the divemaster course. Due to the limited time I had to complete my course, my instructor insisted that I complete the waterskills exercises first. This is made up of 5 tough challenges:

• 400m swim with no gear
• 800m swim with mask, snorkel and fins
• 15 minutes treading water (last 2 minutes with your hands in the air)
• 100m diver tow (both divers in full gear)
• Equipment Exchange

I’m a fairly strong swimmer and I had spent a lot of time training in the swimming pool at the gym, so I managed the swimming tests without too much difficulty. For the diver tow, however, I had to tow one of the instructors who was over 2 metres tall and weighed over 100kg, so that was no easy task. I had my instructor and all the other divemaster candidates yelling “Come on” and “You can do it” and I’m not sure I would have made it in time without them spurring me on.
I also managed to tread water for 15 minutes, although I was unable to hold my hands in the air for the entire 2 minutes at the end, so I lost points, but I was still on track at this point.

The final test proved the most difficult, the equipment exchange, also known as the stress test. This involves completely swapping all your gear with another diver underwater, while buddy-breathing (sharing the same air supply and regulator). I tried four times without success and I was starting to build up a mental block. My instructor wouldn’t let me quit though and on the fifth attempt I managed the test with a perfect score.

Over the next few weeks I was kept busy with theory lessons and assisting the instructors with training openwater divers. There was a lot to learn about the diving business - we even had to work in the dive shop on certain days assisting the customers.

The course requires you to have done at least 50 dives in total, so I spent most weekends at Miracle Waters assisting the instructors. Although it is theoretically possible to complete your training there, my dive school insists that you must lead a dive in the ocean before you qualify as a divemaster and so we set off to Aliwal Shoal for my final tests.

I had some incredible dives at the shoal, but it was most definitely not a vacation. I was expected to stay up till 3am with the party animals (who only had to dive at noon the next day) and then be up at 6am to prepare the gear and load the boats for the first group of divers each morning.

I assisted some of the local instructors with their openwater classes, in the swimming pool as well as in the ocean and I also had to complete a few more skills tests in the pool to complete my training.

Finally, after 3 months of training the time had come for me to lead my first dive. I was a nervous wreck as I gave the pre-dive briefing and we hopped in the boat and set off over the waves to the dive site. The currents are very strong at Aliwal Shoal and most dives there are drift dives, meaning you drop down at one position and the boat follows a buoy and picks the divers up further down the coast.

The problems began the moment we dropped off the boat. It wasn’t supposed to be a deep dive, but as I reached the bottom I was already at 25 metres – I had missed the reef completely. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the water was like pea soup – at most about 2 or 3 metres visibility.

Thankfully, since it was my first time leading a dive, most of the other divers were very experienced. We started the dive with 9 divers in the group, but because of the low visibility and strong current divers were getting lost and by the time we surfaced it was only me and 2 other divers left in the group.

My confidence was at an all-time low and for the first time since the stress test I was starting to feel like I wasn’t going to make it. The instructors all gave me plenty of support though and I heard, for the first time, the stories from the first time each of them had lead a dive. Almost every one of them had had a nightmare their first time. Their encouragement helped a lot and the next day I lead a dive and it went absolutely flawlessly.

By the time New Year’s Eve arrived, most of my training was complete. We had an epic pool party and we danced till well into the next day.

I had one more test to complete though – the snorkel test.

On the 1st January 2014 I qualified as a divemaster.

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