Dive Master

I'm now half way through my dive master course. I just got back from my first trip out on the boat as a Dive Master in training. For the trip I spent most of my time working with a group of students doing their Open Water Course. I've also wrote the first 3 sets of exams and I will be doing the next 3 of them tomorrow. I will then be working with a new group of open water students and will then be back out on the boat on Friday, after that assuming all the exams go well I will be a fully qualified Dive Master.

Rescue Diving

I spent the last week doing a rescue diving course. It involved 1 day first aid training, half a day classroom theory, half a day in the pool, then 3 days of diving out on the reef. The goal of the course was to teach you how to deal with diver related emergencies ranging from simply a paniced diver to under water drownings to search patterns for missing divers.

The trip was actually extremely stressful because while we were on the boat we were basically always in a state of alert because the instructers would randomly at any time simulate drownings, man over boards, and diver panicks and we would have to grab our gear dive in and rescue them. Along with that the instructers were constantly sabataging our gear so before every single dive we would have to meticously go over our gear to make sure everything was in proper working order.

I've now decided to take the next step with my diving and I have signed up to take a Dive Masters course. The course is over an 18 day period, with 6 days on the reef with 20 dives, I will also be helping teach the basic open water course and help with the rescue diver course. On top of that there is a massive amount of theory to learn and several exams I have to take. This however will allow me to work in the diving industry and it is an internationally recognized certification.

Diving

I spend the last weekend out on the Barrier reef doing my advanced open water dive course. Over the 3 days on the reef I do 11 dives incluleding 2 night dives and 2 deep dives.

I got to see all kinds of things like turtles and all kinds of fish, from small anenomy clownfish (Nemo) to massive barracudas to bumphead parrotfish, and stingrays, moray eels. During one of the night dives I even got to dive with the sharks, there were 4-5 grey reef sharks circling the dive boat, and I saw a few more white tip reef sharks on other dives.

I'm going to be going back out diving again this next week to do my rescue dive course. It involves 1 day first aid training, 1 day classroom theory and practice in the pool, then 3 more days out on the boat to do more diving.

Cairns

So I've been hanging out in Cairns for a few days now. On tuesday I was out on the barrier reef scuba diving. Wed I was white water rafting on the Tully river, which was a pretty crazy day. I was in the first group of rafts on the water and they had us doing all kinds of crazy things like swimming through big rapids and jumping off of cliffs. It also happened that there is a damn on the river but for what ever reason the damn was all the way open so there was the maximum amount of water flowing that they get through there.

Yesterday I went up to Kuranda which is a small village in the middle of the rain forest. It was originally a mining town/aboriginal village, but now it has kind of turned into a kind of hippy town tourist attraction. To get up there I took a cable car that goes up above the rain forest which was really cool to see, and for the way back I took a train back down through the mountains. The rides there and back were really good though the town itself didn't have much to interest me, it is mainly wildlife sanctuaries and art galleries.

On saturday I'm going to be heading out on a dive boat for 3 days to go diving on the reef and do my advanced open water course.