Rescue Divers!

It's Monday already, our time here is half through. I can't believe it! A month sounded like such a long time but it's going by waaay too fast.

We had a great time at Moon Restaurant last Wednesday. Then Thursday Martin and I went diving at Habitat Curacao, a dive resort down the coast a ways. We weren't all that impressed with their house reef, ours (Alice in Wonderland) is much prettier :) We studied more on Thursday and then went to a neighborhood party with Sunshine & David in the evening.

On Friday we began our Diver Rescue Course - see the pic above. Poor Martin got a bit too much sun on his head and had to go for creative solutions :) Dang, but that was a lot more difficult than I had anticipated! Our instructor, Dave, was fantastic. We met on Friday and went through the theory and then took the written exam. We only spent about an hour in the water reviewing self-rescue skills. Saturday we were in the water all day going through 10 exercises. We learned how to bring up an unresponsive diver, how to approach tired and panicked divers and how to tow them all into shore/to a dock. How to do rescue breathing, take off our own and their equipment and get them onto dry land. It's not that easy! On Sunday we worked through 4 simulations or scenarios. They were like our final exam. During one, bringing back an exhausted diver, some divers on the dock didn't realize it was a simulation and one stepped right in to help. I was impressed with the man's calm efficiency. I hope I'm that good now :) He got a chuckle when we explained that we must just be very good actors! Today is Monday and I'm so sore. I had double calf charlie horses last night - that was fun... It just goes to show how physical the class was I think. I learned more in this course than any other that we've taken so far. It really makes you think outside of yourself and gain a different perspective. I'm very, very glad we took the class. I hope we never need to use the skills we learned but we're better divers for knowing them.

As for other classes, we have 2 night dives to finish for our Night Dive Specialty and then Tuesday and Saturday this week we'll do the Search & Recovery class with Toni. It's a very productive month for us!

Today we have to read for class tomorrow and we're going diving at Porto Marie, meeting up with Sunshine and some of her friends. Tomorrow morning we'll have class, I think just for half day.

It's paradise here. We're both extremely happy :)