arnotify

I have completed my training as a Divemaster. I have passed all the theory exams, the swim tests and the practical application part of the training. I’ll need to mail in some paperwork, pay my annual dues and liability insurance and I’ll receive my authentic Divemaster card!

This was different than the Rescue Diver training I took a couple of years ago. Rescue Diver is very physical. You have many rescue exercises to do, some of which are quite demanding. For Divemaster, you have to learn a lot of theory (physics, physiology, decompression theory) as well as how to interact with student divers and instructors. However, it´s not physically quite as demanding. I´m glad to have completed both training now. Next step would be the Dive Instructor certification, but I think I´ll wait to get a bit more experience to go for it, although Gabriel tells me it´s essentially focused on marketing.

Three more dives yesterday, and another three today, including a night dive. Nigth diving is really a special experience.

There are at least four different things interesting about diving: the equipment, the fauna, the landscape, the physical experience.

For some people, diving is a great excuse to buy piles of gadget and expensive and complex equipment: compressed air cylinders, exotic gases (argon, helium, nitrox), underwater lights and cameras, etc… You dive because you have to test the equipment. Others couldn´t care less about the equipment: if they could swallow a pill and breathe underwater without equipment, they would.

For some people it´s all about the fauna and flora. They know all about the mating habits of the mantis shrimp and can distinguish between the juvenile, male and female parrot fish. When they’re in the water, they look in crevices and under overhangs for the rarest species. They often have cameras, but not for the equipment, but as a way to record their finds.

Some dive sites, especially deep ones, don’t have much animal life. Instead, there’s the beauty of the reef to enjoy, the towering coral heads, the butresses, the swim throughs, the huge barrel sponges, the fantastic underwater landscapes that feel as if they were from another planet.

And then, there´s the experience of being free from gravity. You don´t weigh anything anymore. You can move left, right, forward, back or up and down. You can move just as easily upright, horizontal, on your side or upside down for that matter. Moving is effortless. You barely have to think “up” and your breathing pattern changes, affecting your buyoancy and causing you to rise. Or a quick flick of your fins and you are propulsed forward.

I´m not much into the equipment, and although the landscapes and the animals are fascinating, I like the physical experience the best. At night, this experience is intensified. You can turn off your light, look away from the other divers and you find yourself floating in space, with nothing around you but the sparkle of the photoluminescent plankton as you wave your hand in front of you and the sound of the bubbles as you exhale. For a moment you feel like Dave Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Actually, I think I´m getting a sense for what astronauts feel like when they travel back to earth. Yesterday I was lying in bed reading, and I wanted to roll. I pushed against the headstand, and I was surprised and disapointed to realize that my body would not just float away as I had been expecting, and as it would have underwater. Instead I had to prop myself up, then clumsily move around. Unfortunately, sometimes you have to get out of the water, just like sometimes you have to get back to earth.

Today I went on the so-called “fast-boat”. It’s not really that much faster as we leave at 8am, half-an-hour before the regular boat, and return only an hour earlier. It is however taking a maximum of eight divers and a single divemaster, and therefore less crowded.

We went to Santa Rosa Wall, then Tormentos Reef. Both dives were great, with less eratic currents than yesterday. Our Divemaster was an expert naturalist, particularly good at picking out the small things in the sand: a couple of Jackknife fish (black and white stripes and a long dorsal fin) hiding in the coral reef, crab, spider shrimp, tiny flounders and larger ones. We also saw the usual baracudas and giant groupers and a very friendly large angelfish who was probably expecting some food from us. I also heard the dolphins again, but didn’t see them this time.

It was the first day of diving in a year for one of the divers on the boat, John. As he was setting up his equipment, his regulator started freeflowing (that is, it started delivering air continuously and forcefully making quite a loud noise). It happens sometimes when the diaphragm of the regulator gets stuck. John started fumbling with it, hitting it and shaking it violently with no effect. I grabbed it from him and put two fingers in front of the air out-take, unsticking the diaphragm and stopping the freeflow. John thanked me and added “I was just checking if it was still working. Haven´t used it in a year”. OK. Well, scuba diving equipment is life support equipment. Specifically, your life. It needs an annual maintenance check, because when you´re about to go on a dive is not the time to find that you should have maintained it. I could tell already that this guy was going to be fun, so I signed up to be his buddy (I need the practice to handle emergencies). Indeed, once we were in the water John had various problems. He wasn´t weighted properly and didn´t have good buoyancy control, so he kept floating up. At one point he started floating toward the surface out of control, which can be dangerous as this can cause decompression sickness or lung overexpansion injury, so I went after him, took control of his BCD and emptied all his air so he could go back down. It´s at this point I found out that his dive computer´s battery had run out, so he had no depth gauge nor a check on his dive profile (another no-no, and another reason why you´re supposed to have yearly maintenance on your equipment). Not long after he ran out of air and I had to escort him to the surface. He started ascending way too fast, and I motionned him to slow down but let him go as my computer was beeping requesting me to slow my ascent. First rule of the Divemaster: don´t put yourself in jeopardy because someone else is doing something stupid. I eventually caught up with him, stabilized him and did our safety stop together. My respect for Divemasters increase everyday now that I start seeing through their eyes.

I went to visit San Gervasio, a site of mayan ruins in the center of the island. Since around 100BC and as late as the 16th century, women from the Yucatan were expected to make a pilgrimage to the temple of Ixchel in San Gervasio at least once in their lifetime. Ixchel in the mayan pantheon was the goddess of midwifery, fertility, medicine and weaving. Iguanas now meander amongst several buildings, temples and roads that remain in the middle of the thick jungle. I spent most of my time running from mosquitoes, but several of them managed to bite me on my feet. As it turns out, malaria is endemic in Cozumel… Oh well.

 

Tonight a US Navy ship has moored in Cozumel, and it´s shore leave for the marines, along with the usual batallion of tourists from the cruise ships (five cruise ships stationned today). Although the marines are dressed in civilian clothes, they stick out. For one thing, there are very few drunk divers in Cozumel — alcohool and diving don´t mix, “Dont´t drink and dive” as the saying goes. For another, tourists are rarely travelling in band of four or five cropped hair young guys. A pack of them got a room next to mine. I hope they´ll be reasonably quiet and I´ll be able to sleep tonight. I have some diving to do tomorrow…

Yesterday I completed all my written exams: Physics, Physiology and First Aid, Equipment, Decompression Theory and the RDP, Dive Skills and the Environment, Supervising Activities for Certified Divers, Supervising Student Divers in Training and PADI Divemaster Conducted Programs. I passed on all of them with 80% or more. One of my answer on navigation was embarrasingly wrong, where I affirmed that three angles of 60° were all you needed to navigate in a triangle pattern… On the other hand I was also able to calculate the amount of air to put in a lift bag to get a 200Kg motor out of the sea floor, or the depth you have to dive at to breath compressed air equivalent to 100% oxygen. All useful skills that will come in handy sometimes.

I also finished the last two water exercises: timed tired diver tow and underwater equipment exchange. For this one, you and your partner go underwater, then strip out of your equipment and exchange it with each other, then put it back again. No practical application whatsoever, but it´s an interesting problem solving exercise. It´s harder than it seems.

I´ve also completed the last bit of the training, which was the drawing of a dive site map, including emergency procedures appropriate to the local site. I´ll show it to Gabriel tomorrow and we´ll see if he approves. I also still need to hear from him how I did on the rest of the practical training.

Yesterday afternoon I went to visit Chankanaab park, which means “small ocean” in yucatec maya . The name comes from a cenote (fresh water pool communicating with the ocean through underground tunnels) which is just next to the ocean. It´s a nice place to visit and take some sun in and snorkel. It also has a nice archaelogocial section describing the various pre-colombian meso-american cultures and a reconstituted typical mayan habitation. I was able to follow along with the guide´s explanation: my spanish comprehension is getting better.

Today, I spent the day diving for fun: El Paseo del Cedral, Tormentos and Paraiso Norte. The first two had some really interesting current. And by interesting I mean that it felt like you were flying at supersonic speed about the coral reef. Lots of interesting animals too: lobsters, giant crabs, angelfish, some baracudas, a nurse shark, giant groupers, a pod of four dolphins, a pipefish.

Also, a familly of four new divers who just got certified. As it turned out, the little girl ran out of air early and started panicking when she hit her reserve. I was able to put my training to good use, reassure her, reach our guide and let him know she needed to go up. Once we were back at the surface, the mother thanked me and asked me if I was a Divemaster. Well… wouldn´t you know it… I hope I made Gabriel proud…

My Divemaster training is progressing. I took some of the theory exams (physiology, conducting Divemaster programs, handling students) and I think I did OK on them. I’ll take the remaining ones tomorrow. I’m also beeing graded by Gabriel on the practical portion of the course. I don’t know the results yet, but Gabriel seems happy with me. I also took most of my watermanship exams, including the 400 yard freestyle swim (10min), the 800 yard fin/snorkel swim (14min) and the 15 minute water treading. I still have to do the tired diver tow, an underwater map of a dive site and do an underwater equipment exchange.

 

We took on a new student. She wanted to become NAUI Advanced Open Water certified (NAUI is a dive certification agency, like PADI). I again served as model for the skills she had to perform underwater, gradually improving my skills to “demonstration quality” level. The funny thing is that she doesn’t seem to be very motivated. She complains about not looking forward to doing some of the requirements, saying that she’ll do them “if she has to”. Well, nobody is forcing her. She doesn’t have to take her advanced certification. She has 40 logged dives, so she’s already a fairly experienced diver. She doesn’t seem to have major difficulty underwater, so I’m not sure what’s motivating her behavior. Her husband is not diving, so she’s probably not being pressured by him to do it. Some of the mysteries that Instructors and Divemasters have to deal with.

 

I did my first wreck dive today. For some reason, the opportunity to do one before had always escaped me. I almost dived the Rainbow Warrior in New-Zealand in 2000, but at the last minute the weather got too rough. Very good conditions today, though, and we went diving the C-53, also known as the Felipe Xicotencatl (I’m also getting better at my Mayan pronunciation). The C-53 was built in 1944 for the US Navy, then sold in 1962 to the Mexican Navy. It patrolled the area until 1999 when it was decommissioned, donated to the Cozumel underwater park and sunk in 82 feet of water off shore from Chankanaab Park. She’s kept upright by eight anchors and she’s starting to get overtaken by coral and algae. Unfortunately, a first layer of coral attached to the paint of the boat, which is now coming off. The underlying metal will be a better substrate and it should be a nice artificial reef a few years from now.

 

This dive ended up as a deco dive (that is, Gabriel and I exceeded the recommended recreational dive tables) and we had to do a decompression stop on our way back up. That happened because of our repeated diving, the residual nitrogen in our issues and the fact that our earlier dive in the morning was a deep dive at 111 feet. No more diving the rest of the day to give a chance to the accumulated nitrogen to leave our bodies.

 

Excellent dinner at La Choza, the best Mexican/Carribean restaurant on the island according to Gabriel. The guacamole and salsa de verdeo were unctuous, the sopa de pescado spicy, but just right and the filete de pescado a la Veracruz, a fish cooked with tomatoes, onions and peppers, delicious. For desert, I had an avocado pie, which was definitely an unexpected flavor for desert, but something one could get used to. Maybe mexican cuisine will grow on me after all…

 

I’m getting used to the climate. In fact, it doesn’t bother me at all anymore. I’ve decided that air conditionners are works of the Devil. In a hot weather like in Cozumel, using air conditionners is asking for a cold, with the large temperature gradient between air conditionned rooms and the outside. I’ve unplugged the one in my room, just relying on the cool breeze of the evening and I feel great.

 

Today we did a two-tank boat dive with Greg, Brett and Bryan. The first one was a deep dive, at Palancar Gardens, the second one was a drift dive at Las Palmas. On the second dive, I gave the dive briefing. I had anxiously prepared my notes on a slate and I tried to remember everything I had to say while using the communication techniques Gabriel had taught me: look each diver in the eyes, don’t give interdictions, repeat every important information at least twice.

 

Later on, we did the Navigation specialty course from shore: using a compass underwater, natural and landmark navigation, tracing a square using only a compass. As I was helping one of the students by measuring the distances on the sea floor, I put my fingers straigth on top of a well camouflaged ray. Thankfully, it did not sting me, but just scurried away. Another close encounter…

 

Greg, Brett and Bryan are equipped with all the latest scuba diving gadgets. They have dive computers with a wireless connection to their air tank to measure the amount of air remaining. They have integrated inflators/alternate air supply. They have foldable snorkels. They have nice log books, tons of dry bags and wet bags, and mask defogger (most divers just spit in their mask to prevent fog from forming underwater, you can tell the real gadget freak by the fact that he uses instead mask defogger, aka spit-in-a-bottle). On the other hand, their fins and masks don’t quite fit, they always have some problems getting their wireless connections to work, and it takes them longer than average to unpack, prepare and put their gears away. I think it’s mostly Greg who wants “the best” as he puts it (he keeps asking us for “the best” dive site, “the best” restaurant, etc…). It’s just that he confuses “the best” with “the most expensive” or “the most exotic”. On the other hand, Brian, one of his sons, mumbles about wanting “the less gear possible”. There is yet hope for future generations…