14: rescue diver (part 2)

The morning of the practical I was feeling pretty nervous. We'd gone over everything but I hadn't had time to read through all of the manual from cover to cover and I was concerned, being the square I am, that I would have missed something. We weren't meeting until later in the morning, so I tried to have a good breakfast and flicked through the book, but I'd reached saturation point.

a typical cause of diver stress

There were three of us doing the practical exam, me, Marie from Canada, and Natalie. Jimmy was our course instructor, and helping him were two other divemasters, Sophie from England and Guillermo from Ecuador. We´d been warned that as part of the course we´d need to be vigilant on safety, so we had to check over the boat, which had been cunningly stripped of first aid equipment, oxygen and life vests by the wily crew. We ran about gathering all the bits we needed and I gathered all the names of everyone who would be on the boat to give to the office in case of emergency, and formed a roll call. While we were getting set up, Jimmy and Guillermo seemed to be having a spat (see manual section on "signs of diver stress"!): Guillermo was drinking 'beer' and Jimmy was muttering profanities in his direction. Aware that this was a (quite well acted) set up, I approached Guillermo, who was near the oxygen room and appeared to be hammering crooked nails into a piece of wood (as you do), and asked him should he really be drinking and perhaps he could please put away the hammer in case there was some terrible accident that required EFR personnel. None of it was real of course, but we were primed for tricks, and there was an air of drama about, particularly among the students doing their open water course who wondered what the hell was going on.

Once we we'd set the boat up, we sat up on the wooden deck for the briefing. Jimmy had told us the day before that he was pleasantly surprised at how well we had done on all the skills in the water, and that while he normally had comments, he'd had nothing he felt he needed to point out to us. I knew he had tricks up his sleeve that day, and told him I didn't trust him one bit. He did give me a strong travel sickness pill though, as I'd told him I was worried about getting sick again.

I was getting my kit together and chatting to Sophie when there was the crash of an air tank behind me, and suddenly Jimmy was sprawled face down on the ground halfway down a ramp, with his legs twisted awkwardly half in and half out of the tank room. Guillermo was doing a good job of playing the anguished attacker, shouting "what have I done?" and rocking backwards and forwards slightly madly. I told him to shut up, and held Jimmy's head while Marie tried to roll him awkwardly over down the ramp. As he turned I saw that he had blood (or, ketchup) all over his face. I started to simulate CPR, when Guillermo screamed "I can no longer live with myself!" and ran over to the dock where he dived into the water and started to drown himself. I told Marie to go and sort him out. I had to press my mouth to Jimmy's cheek to simulate CPR, and after a few moments, he was "awake"! I had succeeded. I then turned my attention to Guillermo, where Marie was getting him out of the water. As I walked down the deck, a girl looked and me and gestured as if to say "you've got something on your face", and I couldn't help laughing, because I knew I was totally smeared in ketchup.

our boat. No, really

We weren't going far to the dive site where we would do our practical scenarios, but the minute we crossed the reef I knew we were in for a challenge. The waves were crashing so high there was surf on top of them (Jimmy later told us 6-8ft waves), and I knew that this was prime hurling conditions. We anchored a little way off shore and immediately got in the water to practice towing an unresponsive diver back to the boat. The conditions off the dock had been flat and calm; the only thing we'd had to worry about were the skills we were concentrating on. Here in the open water, the waves were crashing so high that most of the time I could barely see the boat: Marie was the 'victim', and I towed her back to the boat. Next we did panicked diver. The first bit of this went ok, but my mask was slipping and I'd swallowed a lot of water and got it in my eyes. I felt the rush of nausea coming over me and a huge frustration that it was just too hard, and my confidence in myself wavered. Jimmy and Guillermo were both on the boat and knew something was up. The ladder to the boat was being pulled out by the waves and every time I tried to climb it crashed into me and bashed me hard in the stomach. Jimmy, who'd threatened he was hard as nails, said "don't worry honey" in his southern drawl and helped me up. Within seconds Guillermo had got my BCD and weight belt off and got me some water, but I just felt so upset at feeling sick and needing to get out. After a while I was sick and felt better. Jimmy told me later he didn't think I would get back in the water. I started to put my kit back on.

Jimmy decided we should immediately focus on the underwater skills, to get away from the waves and surface current. We all descended about 10-15 metres into a sandy pit between some coral walls, where immediately the instructors started dismantling everyone's equipment. They started taking off their BCDs, undoing the BCD inflator hoses, losing their masks, loosening their air tanks so they floated away... and it wasn't just them. My tank was unhooked, and various bits of my equipment were detatched by stealth. The whole point was to present a problem solving exercise: prioritising what needed to be sorted first, and being alert to problems. It went on for ages, it was a bit like a circus - just chaos everywhere, fins floating about, masks in the sand - but it was fun and my sickness abated a bit. We then moved on to underwater rescue exercises; I had to bring one of the instructors to the surface who had a ´hand injury´. Of course, she started to struggle, and as we reached about two feet from the surface, I realised Jimmy had turned my air supply off (which I knew might be coming at some point), so I turned to her and gestured 'out of air'. He turned it back on immediately and as we surfaced said I'd done exactly the right thing, but was bemused as to why it had taken nine metres for me to realise my air was out, as he'd turned it off at the bottom.

that's me, hanging from the helicopter

At the surface, we tried again the rescue of an unresponsive diver, that I'd been unable to do earlier. Sophie was the victim. I swam out to her and went through all the actions required: checking for breathing, simulating CPR and kicking to get her back to the boat, while at the same time starting to undo her equipment. After a few moments, the instructor who was monitoring me said "you'd better start swimming soon", and I turned and realised that I had gone nowhere, despite swimming as hard as I could. The conditions were awful; the waves were crashing above us and I was trying to shield the water from getting in Sophie's face, and swallowing a lot of it myself along the way. The rules are: if you can get back to the boat in under 5 minutes, continue CPR; if you can't, just get swimming. So I swam, pulling Sophie along as I went. As I neared the boat, the back of it was rearing up about a foot out of the water, and it was impossible to keep hold of her and get her equipment off at the same time. The only way I could do it was by dragging her hair, because if I held on to her equipment, she would just start to float away. She was still playing unconscious, but I kept telling her how sorry I was I was hurting her. She had some awareness of where we were, and had to hold her head out of the water a little, which was good because we were so near the crashing stern that it would have broken both our necks if we got underneath it. Jimmy was watching carefully from the boat and as I got Sophie's equipment off, I called to him and said could he please help with her hands. He held them as I struggled against the bastard ladder and got out, asking the captain to help get my gear off, and together we both hauled Sophie on to the boat. As I turned her over and did another check, Jimmy clapped me on the back and said well done.

We went for a bit of a leisure dive after that, although I was a bit on edge as I was expecting more tricks, and by the time we got back on the boat I was sadly feeling ill again. Jimmy said the conditions were too bad to stay out there, so we headed back to the marina, and as soon as we got off the boat I puked my guts up. I wobbled back to go and start rinsing kit and putting it away, when suddenly the spat between Jimmy and Guillermo began again. This time, they were so convincing it really looked nasty: they hit each other and fell to the ground, rolling into the water off the dock. There was ketchup everywhere. The final trick. We eventually got them out of the water and sat up on the raised deck with cokes to go over it. Jimmy's top was stained with salsa. He was very proud of all of us, and said that the conditions were the worst he's ever done the Rescue Diver course in.

The next day I took the written exam, and Clare called me a loser because I got 100%. So now it's official, I can rescue you from any water based emergencies, but as I've already told Helen, I'm afraid my skills will only go so far: I believe she's still stuck in the bath, wrinkling up, looking more like a dried fig every day.