From odd, to lost in translation, to fun with helicopters

So the last week at work I would have to say has probably been one of the strangest weeks I have ever had.

It all started out with me teaching an open water diver course, I had 2 students, 2 very odd students. First one was from London, was a royal marine now a london firefighter, the second was a freelance mercenary, yes you are reading that correctly, straight from Iraq to Kewait to Australia to learn to dive. So you know when you see on CNN that a "government contractor" was involved in something, well this was one of those guys. Lets just say that both of these guys were more than a little crazy, good guys but probably certifiably insane. But at least life at this point in time was pretty calm. It wasn't untill the day after that open water course that things started to get really weird.

The way our company operates is that there is basically 2 competing sides of it, the English side and the Japanese side. Basically the english side runs the boat and takes care of the English passengers while the japanese side takes care of the japanese customers. But every so often the sides end up slightly overlapping depending on numbers and that sort of thing. So turns out there are too many Japanese for the Jap side to handle one day so they decide to dump 2 customers on our side, a husband and wife couple. No worrys right? Well if there had been extra english staff no problem, turns out there wasn't any, so I got them both. Problem was I was already teaching English introduction dives that day.

No worries we can multi task!

So basically I was taking all at once English intros, Japanese intros, and certified Japanese divers all on the same dive! But that wasn't the most interesting part of the day. At the end of the first dive I get all my divers back up onto the boat and what do I see? Look what we have a passenger on the back deck layed out in the recovery position on Oxygen. Whats wrong with her you may ask? Well thats a good question, we really don't know. But she was certainly letting us know and I quote "somethings just not right", and "I feel heavy", well what does that mean? Beats me, lets ask the doctors, well beats them also. But she doesn't seem to be getting any better so what does the doctor tell us to do? Thats right get her back into the city and to the hospital! So everyone back onto the boat we're steaming for town! 5 minutes later we get a call from the operations manager, they have chartered a helicopter to fly her off, we are to head for the Reef Magic pontoon and helipad. So we change course and are there 20 minutes later, taking her onto the helipad. Onto the helicopter she goes and back to the safety of civilization.


So know that this has all taken place you may ask just what was wrong with her? Well nothing like having a panic attack that costs the company a few thousand dollars to get you airlifted home. Thats right, there was nothing physically wrong with her. Maybe a little sea sick but thats it, if you had seen how she was acting on the boat you would have sworn she was about to die but sadly no.


But then ontop of all of this coral spawning was going on this week, it happens for only 1-2 days a year so its part of luck catching it though they can predict it to some extent in relation to water temp, moon cycles and what ever else. So besides just doing day trips they have also been running right trips to see the coral spawning at night. They don't have us double shifting but the hours are longer because we have to do extra refules on the boat first thing in the morning meaning we have to be at work earlier and we have to clean down the boat 2 times every day and bring water and supplies and everything on for both trips meaning we have an extra hour or two of work to do every day. Good thing we put in for that over time right? Over time? what? Thats right we get nothing other than 1 less hour of sleep. So to put it lightly its been a little high strung on the boat for the last few days with how everything has been going.

Other than all that life has been pretty quiet outside of work not that I've had time for much else, though I'm going to hopefully be starting a tech diving course after Christmas so thats something to look forward to, nothing like being 60-100m under the water and staying down there for hours on end and when you look up assuming you can still see the surface its like looking up at the tops of sky scrapers.