At the time of writing, the author is somewhat tired and hungover but is over the worst of it.
Yesterday we were to meet at the shop at a more respectable twenty past nine, which meant a bit of extra sleep (theoretically I could have gone to bed earlier too, especially since I was falling asleep in the armchair, but I didn't), and it didn't take long to get going this time - we put twelve tanks of air into the van and most of the rest of the stuff was still there from the previous day, so we took off for Camp Cove again. It was actually a little bit sunny and not raining at all, which was a nice change. Again we got briefed on what we'd be doing today, put our gear together and changed into wetsuits. Dave seemed to be having a bad day, lots of stuff going wrong (which I think was something to do with the shop's credit lines, his business partner seems to be of the happy-go-lucky things-will-sort-themselves-out attitude and Dave has only been running the shop end of things for about six months so he has a lot of tidying up to do), one of which was that he'd have to test a couple of people for their Rescue Diver course after he was finished with us, so he arranged for them to come out to Camp Cove as well in the afternoon.
We plodded into the sea, put our fins on and got told what we'd be up to on this dive. First thing after using our compasses on the surface to swim along a bearing and back again was trying a nice neat descent for starters - sink most of the way to the bottom, popping your ears to relieve the pressure, then just before the bottom inflate the BCD a little to stop sinking, and just start swimming. I managed that okay, and after that it was swimming after Dave for a while, getting some more practise in stuff like moving and breath control and bouyancy. This time around Dave pointed out interesting stuff that he found - funky shells, cuttlefish, a seahorse that he played with a bit (apparently it's pretty unusual to find seahorses), a stingray and some fishes that changed their colour to blend in with the seabed - he poked at one with his bright green fin and it scuttled away, turning slightly bright green as well. We removed and replaced our masks again and did a few other little exercises like that, and then each did a Controlled Emergency Swimming Ascent - take one breath and hold it (to simulate being out of air), signal you're out of air, signal you're going up, then swim upwards slowly, breathing out all the way.
The second dive we did on the same tanks and was pretty much purely a swim for fun, and for getting used to stuff again. After it was finished we did a few more exercises like removing and replacing our weight belts on the surface and removing and replacing our BCDs on the surface. Then we got out and dried off, two of the group took off and the rest of us sat about in the van for a while while Dave waited for his Rescue people to turn up. One did, so he ran through stuff with her and the three of us that were left went to a local pub to wait for him. We had some fish and chips (for some reason I really wanted something laden down with salt and vinegar, which was odd because when I'd removed my mask underwater I got half a noseful of seawater which made the back of my throat feel burny) and then sat about drinking and chatting. After quite a while indeed Dave turned up, annoyed at the latecomer to the test (fourty minutes late, no less) for being late and then being utterly incompetant, causing him to have to fail him - but glad that the worst part of the day was over.
While we were chatting there, the subject of his much-loved mask removals came up. He said that every instructor emphasises different things, and some would just do a single mask removal at the end to get it out of the way, but he does one every time. And he had a story about it. He was taking some newbies down somewhere once, and a guy who'd already been certified and wanted to show his wife what diving's like came along and asked if they could go down together. Dave wasn't hot on the idea, because they'd be hanging out of each other and not paying attention to what's going on, or showing off or something, but the guy was angry and insisted that it's his holiday so he can go if he wants, and eventually Dave relented. Sure enough, the husband kept dragging his wife away from the group to show her things he'd found, but there wasn't much that could be done about it by that stage. So Dave spotted an octopus on a rock, and turned to point it out to the group, and when he turned back maybe two seconds later the husband had his mask off, his regulator (breathey thingie) out and one fin off, and was obviously panicing. Dave swam over quickly and grabbed the guy's regulator and tried to jam it into his mouth, but the guy was holding his breath and wouldn't open his mouth - and then the wife came over and started trying to haul Dave off her husband, going crazy as well. Dave managed to get her off enough to do something, and what he did was to punch the husband in the stomach - knocking the air out of him, and then undid his weight belt so he went surfaceward. The punch had caused the guy to inhale some seawater and he was unconscious and frothing when he was found, but if he'd surfaced while holding his breath the air in his lungs would have expanded and ruptured his lungs, so he was much better off this way. So afterwards on the boat he was thanking Dave profusely for saving his life, and Dave wasn't too impressed and said "So what happened?" "I got water in my mask." "...And?" "So I took it off." Pretty silly move (all you need to do to get water out is exhale through your nose), and when he took it off the first thing he tried to do was breathe in through his nose, a natural thing to do if you're not thinking about it. Naturally that got him a load of water, and he paniced, and the instinctive thing to do when you can't breathe is to rip the thing that's in your mouth out - unfortunately it's the only thing allowing you to breathe. And so Dave reckons practising mask removing is one of the most important skills to learn, because it WILL be required at some stage and is the thing most likely to cause panic, and panic kills.
So after that we went back to the shop and dumped the gear and went into town to a pub we'd arranged to meet up in. The evening was going to be spent in paperwork and eating and drinking, so when the other pair showed up we were given our logbooks and instructed in how to fill them in for the four dives we'd done to date. Dave wrote a comment in each of them (I wasn't a very interesting student, mine says "Open Water diver - congratulations. Nice hover!!!!" in reference to an exercise we'd been doing earlier where you have to control your bouyancy enough to stay stationary, not going up or down and I'd lost my kneeling position and flipped over so my ass was down and my head and feet were up - but I hovered okay) and we filled out or signed a few other things as well, then went to a Chinese restaurant, and filled out more stuff between the courses.
Next stop was a pub - two of the party (Rob & Rachel, who tended to drive themselves places and were the ones who'd gone off earlier) went home at this stage and Lindsay suggested a pub called Scuffy Murphy's, an Irish Pub. I'd never been in an Irish pub before, and it wasn't as bad as I was expecting - there were a couple of Irish roadsigns (directions to Ballina, for example) and the toilet said "Fir" on it over "Men" but it smelled surprisingly authentic and in fact did remind me of a real pub in Ireland to some extent. More sitting, chatting, drinking, getting bored, Dave wanting to play pool, Penny not wanting to, eventually going to another bar with pool tables, playing pool badly (me and Penny) or well (Dave and Lindsay), drinking more, staggering to Lindsay's bedsit thingie in King's Cross where I went to sleep on the floor.
We were awakened at about nine by the return of Lindsay's flatmate who works in Silentworld, and eventually myself and Dave left there and went to find the van (with its new parking ticket) so I could get my towel, and then I got on the train back home feeling like I'd rather be in bed.
Well, after a bowl of museli with chocolate milk and scraping the sticky saltiness off myself I figured it was time to commit myself to a career of divery. Somebody at the shop had been talking about the annoyance of ill-fitting masks that have been misshapen by having been on loads of different faces, and it was this which pushed me over the edge and made me determined to buy my own set of basic gear. When I got the the shop Dave was there, looking pretty much like I felt, and he explained the package deal they do of mask, snorkel, fins, mask tamer (a cloth cover that goes over the rubbery strap of the mask, making it easier to take off and put on) and a bag. I didn't care about the bag, but seeing as I could buy all the other stuff for the same price as the package deal and not get a bag, it was worthwhile. I got a good ordinary set of fins and snorkel, but splashed out a bit on a really good mask with fancy wide-field-of-vision stuff going on. I also joined the shop's diving club, because that way I'll actually get to go diving again whereas otherwise I probably wouldn't.
So I'm pretty happy with my bag of stuff, and with my newfound skills. I've got a cert and a logbook and am ready to dive. And to my surprise, my fellow students progressed significantly over the course of, uh, the course, and the idea of them being allowed dive without total constant supervision no longer worries me. Dave had been surprised last night that I'd never dived before, and indeed that I hadn't been swimming in a body of water bigger than a drinking fountain in ten years, but when I was asking about the trips the shop arranges to Nelson Bay, a marine sanctuary with loads of dolphins in it and whether it'd be worth my while going there before getting my Advanced qualification (my current one, Open Water, is no-frills - no wrecks or caves or deep diving or night diving or anything like that) and he said that most of the dives are to about 25 metres (significantly deeper than the 18 to which I'm certified), and then thought for a minute and said that he wouldn't mind bringing me down to 30 metres, he knows how I'd react and reckons it'd be fine. I was certainly flattered, but I'd much rather get some shallower experience before doing crazy stuff like that. I'd really like to poke about some wrecks though, so after a while I'm going to look into doing the Advanced course.
There might be a dive on on Sunday, which I can attend for free because of my shiny new club membership, which also gets me half-price equipment rental. I'll check up on that later in the week to see if it's happening.
One thing that really got me thinking was the way Penny, who had been having terrible trouble with mask removals, managed to slog through it and force herself to get the hang of it. It occurs to me that I've never had to work hard at anything - things tend to come easy to me, or I don't bother with them at all. That could be why I'm a bit lazy and didn't stick with college. I think I'll phrase it in the flattering way of saying I'm too smart for my own good, but there's plenty of less pleasant ways the same meaning could be conveyed. Well, I'll have to keep my eyes open for opportunities to battle through something, like she did, and see how it goes.