WFR and Raleigh

Just a quick update on what has been happening.

I've now been in Raleigh, NC for just over a week and have just completed my Wilderness First Responder course. The course was pretty interesting, it went far beyond what you would think of as basic first aid, and covered everything from how to set broken bones and reset dislocated joints to how to administer shots, how to give spinal assessments for trauma patients. Not to mention that I am now allowed to pronouce people dead after 30min of sustained cardiac arrest.

I'll be flying down to St. Maarten tomorrow. For the first couple days after I arrive it appears that I will have the days to myself to just explore the island before any real work starts.

I'll post another update when I have a more clear idea of what is going to be happening when I actually arrive in St Maarten and how the trips are going to work out. Including when I actually leave on my trips around the islands.

Canada and Beyond

It has been quite a while since my last post so here is a bit of an update on what is going on.

I've been back in Canada for about and month and a half now. I will be leaving tomorrow to go on my next adventure.

First I will be flying to Raleigh, NC to take a Wilderness First Responder course. (http://wildmed.com/subframes/courses/8_day.html) As soon as I complete this course I fly out to St. Maarten where I will be working out of for the rest of the summer.

As mentioned in earlier posts I will be working for Broad Reach, a youth problem for the summer similar to Outward Bound. Basically I will be living on a yacht in the Caribbean for the summer with about a dozen kids at a time on a yacht teaching them to scuba dive and sail. There was a slight change in plans where I originally thought I was going to be going to Belize but I was transfered to the Caribbean program instead. So the trip I will be taking will look something like this:

St. Maarten -> Ile Fourche -> St. Bart's -> St. Kitt's -> Nevis -> Saba -> Statia -> St Maarten

The trip in total will be about 3 weeks. I will be doing this trip most likely 3 times this summer.
To get more info on the program that I will be running you can go to (www.gobroadreach.com)

Heading Home

So the time has finally arrived for me to say goodbye to Australia. I've now left Cairns and have arrived in Sydney where I am going to spend my last couple days before my flights back to Canada.

I have had an amazing time living here in Australia for the past year, and have done things I never would have seen myself doing. From sailing to diving, to simply travelling half way around the world on my own.

The truth is, I'm more than a little sad for this all to be coming to an end. I spent the last few days saying goodbye to all my friends in Cairns. I've made tons of amazing friends in the last year and I'm going to miss you guys when I head home. The door is always open though so if any of you guys ever make it to Canada or where ever else I may be don't think twice about stopping in to say hi.

I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with the rest of my time here in Sydney. And I'm finding the weather shockingly cold. It was around 19C today and I was freezing, I'm not sure how I'm going to survive when I go back to Canada. I wouldn't have thought I would have become so completely aclimatized but I guess living in the tropics for almost a year does that to you.

Matinne.

Australian adventure coming to an end

So my time here in Australia is almost up and I'm going to be heading back to Canada in a little over a months time. But don't despair for me yet, my next adventure is already in the making. In case you haven't been reading up lately I have a job lined up in the Carribean for the summer season. To be more exact though I am going to be working in Belize taking part in a marine biology project studying dolphins.

Roughly my schedual looks like this, I will be returning to Canada the 31st of march. I will have about one and a half months back in Canada then I will be heading down to Religh, North Carolina for staff training starting on the 21st of May. Then be heading down to Belize in the first week of June or so. I will then be in charge of running the Dolphin studies program along with 1 other staff member who is a marine biologist. So from the looks of it I will be in charge of most of the water activities and that end of things and the biologist will be in charge of the academics side of things. To give an idea of what the program will look like here is a link to the programs website: http://www.academictreks.com/programs/ds.asp

I'm excited about the change that It will offer from what I'm currently doing here and I'm looking forward to heading back to Canada for a little while it only so I can have a bit of a vacation, well at least not be working for a little while.

Life at sea

I'ts been a while since my last update and a fair amount has changed. I'm no longer working for Tusa dive but instead working for Spirit of Freedom which is basically the same company but is the luxury live aboard that does week long trips up through the ribbon reefs to the cod hole then out into the coral sea and to Osprey reef which is a detached reef 200km from shore.

My current work schedual looks basically like this. The trips last 7 days, the go out monday around noon and return to port the following monday around 6am. I work from roughly 5:45am each day till around 9pm each night. Except for Saturday and the last monday that I have to be working by about 5:30am.

We do up to 5 dives a day on the boat at usaully 3 differnt dive sites each day. This means that pretty much when people aren't diving we are moving the boat, so we are more or less always on the move. The boat itself is 36m and can carry up to 26 passengers and has a crew of 10. The cleintel we deal with also is very different from the day boat. The cost to come for the week on SoF starts around $3,000 for the week and goes up from there. So most of the passengers tend to be North American or European and tend to be slightly older with the average age probably in the 50's. The fact that we are also much farther from land has a lot of complications also as I learned my second week out on the boat where we had 3 medical emeregencies in 1 week.

First of all on the first dive tuesday morning when one diver was exiting the water they caught their fin on the ladder and fell over breaking their ankle seveirly. Once we stablelized her and got her leg braced we had to steam the boat to lizard island where their is an airstrip to get her flown out to a hospital. To simply get her off the boat their we had to put her in a streacher and use the crane to lower her over the side into the tender to take her to land. Then carry her up the beach get her loaded into a van to get her to the airstrip then get her on the plane to take her back to Cairns. After returning from the trip we found out that she went into surgery and had to have a plate and 2 pins put in to fix her ankle.

That following night we had a bit of comic relief provided by our deckhand Bryce. In the evening because of the lights on the boat hundreds of fish are attracted to it because they feed by the light coming from the boat. This however means there is a very large school of fish often off the back of the boat at night. So Bryce had the bright idea of trying to catch a fish by jumping off the back of the boat. Unfortunately he found out red bass have a skull plate thicker than him, and ended up splitting his lip in half when he jumped in and landed on one. This called for the skipper of the boat to play doctor and stitch his lip back together while the rest of the crew sat arround taking pictures and making jokes all in the confines of the infurmory/wheel house of the boat. That being said I think Tony might have found a new calling as a doctor because the stitchs turned out amazingly well.

It wasn't for a few more days that we had our 3rd medical emergency. On Thursday aftering having just left Lizard Island for the second time in the trip after having taken on more passengers there as norming one passenger started to complain that he was having problems with his eye and that he was losing he sight out of it. After getting on the phone to a doctor we were forced to turn the boat around once again and return to lizard island for a 3rd time to have him taken off by plane so he could get to a specialist. So this all made for more than a little interesting trip.

The diving is much better out on Osprey than it is right out of Cairns. Cod hole left me rather unimpressed seeing as all it is is a bunch of giant cods that are only there because they are hand fed every day. Osprey is amazing though, its basically a mountain coming up in the middle of the ocean just to the surface. It is 24km long and 10km wide, and it drops down off the side to more than 1300m deep. You can dive there to 40m and see down another 40m and watch as it just gets darker and darker. And it litteral looks like looking down a snow covered mountain because all the sand and coral looks like rocks and snow. The reef also attracks a lot of bigger stuff. We do a shark feed there every week which brings in 50-60 sharks some of which are oceanic silver tips that can get close to 3m long. On other dives we could easily see 5-6 sharks along with eagle rays and there are often manta rays though i haven't seen any yet.

I also have some more good news, I have secured my job in the Carribean for when I am finished here in Australia. So I'll be returning to Canada on the 30th of March then heading down to NC for training in May then heading from there down to the Carribean for the summer.

Couple pics from diving

Just me hanging around with a 3m guitar shark.

One for national geographic - Green Turtle

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.