A Couple’s Journey

As I mentioned in a previous post we are assisting instructors now.  We just finished up an Open Water course.  It was pretty cool.  They let Maryanne and I both assist, which made it a little easier as it was new and nervous all at the same time.  Granted we had just gone through the class ourselves not that long ago, but to help new students!!!  Yikes!  The instructor for the course was a guy we hadn’t met before, so trying to figure out his style was a little interesting.  Of course as my luck would have it, his accent is a little thick.  Thankfully Maryanne was there to translate sometimes.  Okay now before you go thinking we are fully hands on with the students, I must tell you what we actually did.  The first time we met the students was in the pool portion of the class.  Before they showed up, Maryanne and I got all their gear setup for them. We then just hung in the background while the instructor showed them how to assemble the equipment.  When it was their turn we made sure they were doing it correctly, answered a few of their questions.  Just basic stuff.  Then I got their weight belts and put a couple of weights in my pocket in case they needed extra weight once in the pool.  The class was good, not really any issues.  We demonstrated some skills for them that day.  The following day was spent in the ocean. Again we got their gear setup and then off to the boat.  It was a shallow water dive about 4 meters.  We pretty much just followed them and looked at the fishies!!  Thankfully it was not like the rescue course where the pretend students would take off their masks, fins, BCD, etc or pretend to panic or just do other stuff a diver might do.  Our Open Water students were good, thankfully.  Most of the time I just worked on not using so much air!  Then next two days we were back in the water going deeper to about 18 meters.  The seas were quite rough and some of them got a little seasick, poor guys. The last day of the Open Water course students get taught the James Bond entry.  Which is a front flip off the front of the boat where you land on your tank.  Pretty nice to do in calm seas, however that day we had pretty big swells!  Maryanne pulled me aside beforehand and was like I hope he doesn’t expect us to do this!  Sure enough we had too.  I had to demonstrate it for them.  Man it was tough just to get to the edge of the boat!  Luckily I timed my jump as we were coming down so I didn’t have to drop too far.  When the boat was up it was about 3m to the water.  Anyway perfect entry, although I feared I might rotate all the way around back to my feet.  Maryanne like me had a tough time getting to the edge but no worries perfect landing!  We are old pros (29 dives as of today)!   So away we went with the students and videoagrapher!  Easy dive, Maryanne’s boob even made it into the video!  They have all these hand signals for the different fish the students will see, the one for Grouper happens to be like someone groping a women’s boobs (pan to Maryanne). Thanks Charlie!  So with our first assist out of the way, we feel a lot more relaxed.  The best part of that day was going to eat Indian food with Mark and Deb.  Okay to fill you in Mark and Deb are freelance Divemasters working here.  Mark has been fantastic showing us the ropes, answer questions and just a fun person to chat with.  Deb is just awesome!  They are a great couple from south of Perth.  Mark even helped me decide what gear to buy.  Oh yeah so since we are doing so much diving, we decided it would be best to buy our own gear.  So yesterday we went with Helena the dive shop lady and went shopping!!  We got regulators yesterday, our BCDs don’t come in till Wed.  Of course I was crushed as we were supposed to dive in the morning and after figuring out which one I was going to get I really wanted to try it out.  We were going to try to keep the cost down a little bit however Maryanne found this accessory that you put on your mouth piece to make it light blue.  Which would match her gear he already has.  Of course the piece was only for the more costlier regulator, so I got the puppy dog eyes and we got the more expensive regulators!!  Okay they were only 100 dollars more, but actually really good regulators!  After all the shopping what better way to spend the night then play Texas Hold’em!!  Now it has been raining a lot lately because of the storm that hit the phillipines last week.  So trying to get to this resort for the game was insane in the rain, in spain staying mostly on the plains…. sorry lol  First we had to drive the bike to the top of a hill only to walk down the hill through the woods, across the beach to another freakin hill.  Luckily there was a road however I don’t know what car could make it up this road.  It was so bad we had to take our shoes off cause it was really slippery.  Some parts we actually were crawling.  Thankfully we had someone to follow as there was no way directions would have helped. GPS coordinates maybe!  At the top of said freakin hill was the nicest resort on the island!  One night is what we would spend for 3 months in our bungalow.  Helps when one of the players is owner/manager!  It was good night though, we didn’t win but had fun anyway. 

Okay so that brings us to today!  Anyone still reading??? Man I will never go this long without posting again, my fingers hurt! Or if I do I will just be like yep the last 7 days were fun, the end!  Anyway so the new regulators rock!  Very easy to breathe, however our dive got cut short when one of the guys in our group disappeared/swam off.  What a wanker!  So we spent most of the dive looking for him, finally just came back to the boat after 30 min. Man were we upset!  Luckily one of the instructors sat him down for a chat, since he is a DMT like us and showed know better.  Problem sorted on our next dive he stayed with us!  Although our other dive partner had her compass stick so we got a little lost 🙁  No worries though I rock at navigation.  I got us to the coast to see fishies!!!  Then back to the boat. 

Alright not a bad day all in all though.  Okay Maryanne is yelling at me for writing a novel, saying no one is going to read this whole thing!  I disagree someone is still reading right…..right….hello….come on this took me a long time to do this for you 🙁 I am sad, I will no drown myself in 2 for 1 buckets of Vodka and Juice!  Bye bye mom, cause you are probably the only one still reading!  And for the rest of you who skipped to the end…..well thanks for at least trying to read this!

Tags: Thailand

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 6:59 am and is filed under Thailand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.