Thursday, October 4, 2007

Living the dream

Its been a while since my last post which is mainly due to the fact that I have been insanely busy. I got a job as a dive instructor working for Tusa dive on their brand new day boat. (http://www.tusadive.com/index.html)

We take up to 60 passengers a day to go scuba diving and snorkeling. On average we have about 12 staff on the boat including skipper, and hostess, the rest being dive crew. My days usually start around 5:30am when I have to get up to be at work for 6:30. I have a 25min walk to work each morning from where I'm currently living. The day starts up with us setting up equipment for everyone who is going to be coming on the boat along with our own dive gear. The passengers start boarding around 7:30 with us leaving harbour by 8:30 after everyone is checked in and has completed all needed paper work. It takes about 1.5 hours to get out to the reefs normally depending on where we are heading on any given day. We do 3 dives a day, 2 in the morning and 1 more in the afternoon. On any given day I could be responsible for taking care of the certified divers, teaching open water diver classes, giving introductory scuba lessons, and looking after the snorkellers.

We try to have the boat back into harbour for 4:30 so that means we have to leave the reef by 3:00 at the latest having everyone back on board and all gear stripped down by that time. We then have to spend 1 hour a day cleaning and boat and going over safety drills. So its roughly a 11 hour long day, of which I am working 5-6 days a week.

As bad as that all sounds it really isn't, I am getting paid to go scuba diving after all. Of course I am responsible for the lives of up to 60 people on any given day which can be a little stressful at times but the crew on the boat is really good and we have a lot of fun doing what we do.

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