Divemaster Exams and climbing Mountains

Another week down and I'm actually more than halfway through my internship. I really dont know time managed to fly by so quickly - but it did.

I led my first dive this week at Abades. We we're only 4 interns and no customers, so its not like there was any real pressure on me.

Anyway, Andres, Mahmoud, Lydia and I did three dives (Lydia only did the two first due to some misunderstanding regarding bringing enough bottles), Typical intern :)

I led the first dive. We were told to do a 30 minutes dive, and then surface exactly at our descend point.

Everything went fine - after 15 minutes of dive I signalled that it was time to start making our way back and everything went as smooth as I could wish for!

The only hassle we had, was the fact that the surge had roughed up so much silt were we were to descend and ascent, that the visibility was down to one or two metres. We stayed close together and never lost track of each other, so no it was never any major issue!

Andreas led the second dive, and Mahmoud the third, they both did well.

We had Pete timing our 400 meters swim this week as well. Swimming laps in a pool never was my cup of tea, but at least I finished within the allotted time - so I got it in writing now! 

We also did the 15 minutes float (whereas the last to minutes is with your hands and wrists out of the water) In the pool doing the 15 minutes float with me, I had Andreas and Mahmoud. Mahmoud and I had no problem floating the first 13 minutes, but Andreas (due to "slimmer" physic) was struggling a bit keeping buoyant. Then came the signal to raise our arms, and we did. I remained floating as if no change had occurred.

Mahmoud started struggling to keep is nose above water and Andreas just went down like a rock. All that donut eating finally paid of I suppose!

Our very own Alice, AKA Kim, AKA Santa's little helper rose to the rank of PADI instructor this week. So, well done and congratulations to her!

Convenient enough we had 4 customers, 3 of them doing their PADI Advanced course , so Alice was baptised in the doings of an instructor.  
Alice, Peter, the 4 customers and I headed for yellow mountain to do the course's. 
First we did a Peak Performance Buoyancy dive consisting of some exercises in the likes of hovering and swimming through hoops - they all did well - some more than others of course.

Next dive was a navigation dive. Before the second dive, I decided that I had enough air left in my tank from the first tank (you see were this is going already?)

After around 30 minutes of dive, I was down to my last 20 or so bars, and I decided it was time for me to get back to the boat. I swam up to Alice, intending to signal that I was low on air, and wanted to surface.

Poor Alice, conducting her first ever course as an instructor, and doing really well. And then suddenly she has this diver tapping her shoulder, signalling that he is out of air.

Ah well, nobody drowned and all went well in the end, so the day ended as a success for all of us.

There hasn’t been a whole lotta diving this week. We are mainly focusing on polishing our PADI Divemaster skills for the skill circuit. So this means many an hour in the cold waters of the small pool, consulting our slates to see what skills we should do next, trying to forget that we are shaking so much that it feels like we are dancing.

At least I feel that we are all making progress, developing pretty smooth like instructing skills!

It has also been a huge step forward that I passed my Divemaster exam. I can't remember my exact score, but I did alright.

We had a few days of this week, actually we had two days of in a row. The first day of, Andreas and I decided that we had seen what Golf del sur had to offer, so we headed of to Los Christianos for a crazy night out to end all crazy nights out. 
I don’t want to bore you with every boring little detail of our adventure. But the climax would be the two of us ending at a local discotheque at around four in the morning wanting to socialise with some of the locals. We actually had great fun at that place, that is until we got kicked out by a grumpy bouncer for performing a neat little party trick we have invented called the "spider-pig".

The "spider-pig" truly is an amazing acrobatic trick that is out of this world. To perform the "spider-pig" you need to have two guys. One guy stands perfectly still, while the other on jumps up and hangs on his shoulders, climbing all the way around his waist, and then over his shoulders and out through his legs - WITHOUT TOUCHING THE GROUND! 
Needless to say, we were the kings of that discotheque upon performing our act - at least in the eyes of us and the guests, but not in the eyes of the bouncer!

The observant reader may recall that I have been writing about climbing the "Montaña Roja" in one of my older blogs. So on our second day of, the mountain climbers club got together again - this time we had our eyes on a much higher mountain that we had named "Titty Mountain".

We started walking towards the mountain at around 13:30 in the afternoon, and reached the bottom of it around 17:15.

We had been walking all day, and now we were facing a serious problem, we had only around one hour worth on sunlight left, and the mountain was looking pretty steep.
The sensible thing would have been to call of the expedition and return on another day. But the mountain climbers club does not consists of weaklings, so we decided to go to the top, plant our flag, and hightail it down that mountain side before dark. 
Of course we ended up on that mountain top in pitch black, being trapped for more than four hours, before we found a somewhat safe trail down again. 
We all learned an important lesson that day!

"We all happy bunnies?"

-Dennis