Heading out to Penida for some training dives!
Divemaster Trainees, Ellen, Kræn and me together with Divemaster Mads Frese and IDC Staff Instructor Andre Saloranta going on a trip to Nusa Penida for some training dives.
It was Perfect we all practiced on doing a Boat Briefing on what the boats name is, what the names of the boat crew was and where snacks, drinks, toilet and emergency equipment such as First aid kit and Oxygen was, it was some good practice on it because we had only done it once before. The 2 new DMT’s Ellen and Kræn, got to practice their Deep Scenario where we went down to 21,4 Meters and they did their Navigation part. Which meant they were diving 20 kick cycles out with one heading and had to turn around and go back to the starting point, following their compass. I assisted when Ellen did hers, tapping her shoulder if she got to much out of course, and Kræn and did the same. Both did very well and completed it nice and easy, meanwhile Mads took some good pictures. After that we just had a fun dive, where we went around in Manta Point and saw a couple of Mantas swimming around, together with a lot of other awesome stuff. After that when we got to the point of being low on air, Ellen and Kræn practiced sending up their SMB’s (Surface Marker Buoy) and the Captain of Nagisa, the boat we are using for our trips sent down the safety stop tank, that is pat of a deep dive, as an extra security if anyone on a deep dive is running really low on air. They practiced breathing through the regulator on the safety tank for around 1 minute and after that we waited for our safety stop to end and went up.
We made a little smal 25 minute pit stop in Manta Bay, Where Ellen and Kræn was doing their Skin Diving guiding, they did really well. The rest of us were customers and simulated some likely problems that could happen on a Skin diving trip, like separate from your budy, go to far away from your group or just simply loosing your fin on the way back to the boat. Still good fun and they both did good on the guiding part.
The next spot we came to was chosen by me, because I was going to do Discover Local Diving, I was going to plan the dive, do a dive briefing, do the dive as a guide and debrief after the dive. The scenario in my training was the customer, Ellen, Kræn, Andre and Mads have not been diving for 2 years and just had a Scuba review done the day before.
The spot was Toya Pakeh, and the first thing Andre asked me was how I thought the conditions were. I wasn’t so sure about it. It looked like there was a bit current but couldn’t tell how strong. Then Andre told me that we could take the dive but it was going to be interesting, the currents could not be read that good and could change from second to second. ( only reason we took the dive was that we knew everyone could do it and get some experience in little difficult diving conditions, if it was with real customers i would most likely have chosen a different spot.
So we went on the dive and started out, and we got hit by a lot of strong currents, especially a strong down current. It pulled us down around 5 meters. The dive was following the current so we were diving back and forth pretty much all the dive, i didn’t want to lead my “guests” against the current which would have been tough. I think i did okay, we had some good fun diving with the current and had some fun with each other as well. During the dive Andre and Mads took some pictures and videos, hopefully the video clips will turn into a great DMT video showing a good day as DMT’s at crystal divers.
We all had and awesome day, with 2 good dives, and we learned a lot of stuff during the day. Also got signed off on some of our Dive Master Trainee tasks.
Now I just hope we can get another trip like that, just diving and having and awesome funny day together again.
//Mark Bisgaard – Divemaster trainee at Crystal Divers
