Rescue course!

Hello all of you who are following this blog! So I touched down in Bali two days ago I had one day of rest and recovery from some crazy jetlag. I spent my morning lost in the maze that is the streets of Sanur a community to the east of Denpasar which is the main city. The roads are all very narrow and run in seemingly random directions, mostly unmarked and even ending in dead ends or turning into dirt roads. So I have just moved into my new residence at the Sanur Bagoes Guest House a couple of hours ago! The man who runs it is very friendly all smiley and willing to help in any way, it was very welcome after a long day. 

I started my day here in the courtyard of blue season Bali. 

I spent my morning in the pool learning rescue skills from both Sandra the internship leader and steph an intern. Both were incredibly friendly and patient as I learned the intricacies of the techniques they were teaching me. After a successful morning in the pool where I clocked an (apparently) impressive time of 24 seconds during a run through of rescuing a non responsive diver at the surface. After a delicious lunch of veggies rice and peanut sauce. They were very accommodating towards my somewhat picky preferences( as some of you well know ;) )

Lunch was delicious after wards we packed upall of our gear to hit the local beach to run through the exercises again in open water. When we arrived we barely had to do any lifting ourselves there are guys who spend the whole day at the beach helping dive boats load up all their gear. The beach is a very popular dive area and is absolutely crowded (unfortunately) there were boats pulled up on shore as well as tied to buoys probably a km from shore. The area seemed quite crowded. 

We made our way the dive site called Dog's Point, the reason for the name seems have to been lost with time but the name has stuck. There was a a slight current running through the channel in the reef this is where we anchored and began to practice my newly learned skills.  The current made it difficult for me to do some of the excercise do to my lack of physical fitness :/. But after a couple of tries I seemed to have gotten the hang of it. Most of the excercises happen on the surface but a couple happen below the market green water. As we descended it became clear that the visibility was rather poor ranging from 3m to 5m, largely due to algae booms giving the water the murky, green quality. We did a couple of excercises under the surface including navigation and rescue techniques for both tired and panicked divers. It is fairly nerve wracking practicing the skills that may one day save someones life. I hope that the situation never arises and if it does that I'm prepared, although I truly hope it doesn't.

After we had finished up the skills section in the water we had time to take a little recreational dive around the local reef. Even with poor visibility and a smal reef we still saw many wonderful things. Tiny clown fish rubbing themselves among anemones. A moray eel peeking it's head out of a crevice in the rocks, he was very little only about 30cm long and very peaceful looking. We also saw another fish I don't know the name of it yet but it looks very similar to nemo. But instead of stripes he had spots of varying sizes and large beautiful fins that fluttered with every movement. The fishes pattern were made all the more interesting by the way he moved.  It almost looked as though he was doing a little dance and shaking his butt. It's was very beautiful to behold I wish I had had a camera with me but hopefully the next time I'll be able to capture it on film to share with all you lovely people.

When we surfaced it began to rain quite heavily the sky dumped buckets on us and the wind picked up but we still had to practice throwing a floatations device as well as assisting a panicked diver from the boat. After we were all soaked to the bone and freezing we made are way back to the dive centre to log our dive and clean our gear. 

I had a lovely first day meeting my new instructors and getting introducede to the first of many dive sites. One more day of rescue then I will start my dive master internship! Hopefully I will have more pictures to put up tomorrow evening. 

Thanks for following!