13: rescue diver (part 1)

divemaster Dec

Now I don't have many photos to accompany this post, mainly because I spent a lot of time in the water for the rest of this week, so some of them will be random, and I'll nick some more of Clare's. As part of signing up for courses, Clare and I got two free dives, which we took on the Monday morning. Utila is meant to be one of the best diving locations in the Caribbean, but I have to say both Clare and I were a little underwhelmed. I've been diving in Brazil, Mexico, Belize, the Virgin Islands and the Red Sea and all of them had richer coral and aquatic life than I saw off Utila. Admittedly, the reef has suffered hurricane damage, but it was disappointing nonetheless. For some reason, I felt sea sick during our dive (I am prone but not usually when the sea is calm) and I had to be sick underwater, which is an interesting experience. I swam away from Clare to find a spot away from any coral, but she kept swimming towards me... even though I think she knew what was about to happen. She wasn't going to leave me! You have to be quite technical: your regulator is set up so that you can puke through it, so you really have to time breathing carefully. Reassuringly for me, I didn't panic, so all was well. Our dives were directed by Irishman Dec, who helped me out of the water and kindly got me water and out of my kit. He used to be a corporate banker in London and then decided to become a divemaster in Utila, where he and his wife Sarah have built a house. The two of them were a fab pair; both bleached blonde by the sun and with an air of cheerfulness that comes with living on the water. It turns out Sarah was from Bexleyheath, very near me, so we had a moments of nostalgia!

That afternoon Clare started her course, so I met up with her on the high rise deck at the dive centre that evening, where I got chatting to Dan, an army officer on leave who would be going to Afghanistan later in the year. We sat chatting and drinking beer in the warm evening air, watching the sun slip away beneath the horizon, and headed across to an Italian restaurant to top up our carbohydrate intake, which I'm sure was at perilously low levels.

I had a quiet morning the next day while Clare was continuing her course. As part of doing the Rescue Diver course, I also had to do the PADI-endorsed Emergency First Responder course: basically first aid. I spent the afternoon in the dive centre watching the EFR video, amused by all the staged scenarios where the responder just happened to be carrying latex gloves and a pocket breathing mask. There were just two of us doing the course; our instructor Jimmy came in and introduced himself after we'd finished watching the videos, and I sat chatting with him for a while when we were on our own. Jimmy was a heavily accented "ex law enforcement official" from Tennessee, and he was keen to let me know that this would be an incredibly hard course, and it was likely that I would cry at some point, which I found pleasing. We started the EFR part of the course early the next morning, talking about all the usual first aid stuff like breathing and CPR, as well as things like administration of oxygen etc. It was Clare's birthday, so that evening we headed out with the boys to a Mexican restaurant and the treehouse bar at the Jade Seahorse.

probably good that this is small and blurry

After finishing EFR the next morning we started the theory of the Rescue Diver course. I`d been lent one of UDC's manuals and needed had to read the whole book in about two days; we would get in the water the next day. That afternoon, Clare had finished her course, so we celebrated by lazing about in the pool drinking beers from the pizza restaurant, and the longer we stayed, the more and more people seemed to join us. It turned into a bit of a crazy pool party, mainly where Clare, Dave and I tried to drown each other, and Aaron bought us (me? I think I ate most of it) pizza which we ate sitting in the jacuzzi. Eventually we drank the bar out of beer and that sort of put a stop to proceedings.

We got in the water off the dock the next morning. I was ready to be burned alive by the sun, so was attractively geared up with a long wet suit and a headscarf to protect me from getting fried. If you've never had to get in or out of a full wetsuit: imagine being in a changing room in a shop, trying to get on and do up a pair of trousers that are slightly too small for you? Well, it's like that, but less dignified, and in public.After several hours, I had got it on, and we were in the water.

bad photo of divers practicing off the dock

We started off with basic surface skills: how to drag a diver back to a boat; how to manage a panicked diver. The first was pretty easy: pull them back by their tank or using an arm lock. The second was a bit more taxing, as a panicked diver is likely to try and climb on top of you or pull you under, so you have to swim under the water, creep up behind them, grab their tank and inflate their BCD. Of course, the instructors made it as hard as they could, so they would immediately start struggling even more, which meant getting hit in the face and them trying to pull out your air supply.

We continued skills under the water, doing buddy breathing (where you breathe from your buddy's alternate regulator) and rescuing unresponsive divers from the sand, and later moved to rescuing an unresponsive diver from the surface, which involved combining giving CPR and dragging them back to the boat - a bit harder than I thought it would be. Tomorrow we would go over all the skills we had learned, and head out into open water to do the practical part of the exam. We were promised that surprises would be in store.