Friday, July 1, 2011

Science Diver Training Day 7

After a relatively quiet morning taking tests and re-learning how to use dive tables (all but one of us have dive computers), I think everyone assumed Thursday was going to be a pretty easy/slow day.

Boy, were we wrong! Search and rescue training commenced after lunch.

This time we weren’t running slow search patterns for beer bottles and cinderblocks, it was time to learn what to do in an actual emergency. Towing a tired diver in full gear back to the boat and figuring out how to subdue a panicked diver in order to tow them back to the boat is seriously tiring.

Not to mention that we took Twin V out by Fort St. Catherine, so the current was kind of killer. No matter how tired we were after our four dives on Tuesday, I think any one of us would have taken a four-dive-day over swimming against a current in full gear for four hours.

Parts were pretty entertaining, however. We weren’t supposed to yell “help,” for obvious reasons, so our mock-tired divers yelled “PIZZA” to get the attention of the divers on the boat.

On the less entertaining side, I think Jorge and I were covered in bruises from people practicing pulling us onto the boat and rolling us over to do “CPR.” (My upper thigh kept getting rolled into the motor… fun!)

Finally, Forrest pretending to be a lost diver, still submerged and we worked as a team to find him, rid him of his gear, alert emergency medical services, and get him on the boat to start CPR. We got him back to Twin V in four minutes and 23 seconds.

The moral of the story: If you’re ever in a diving emergency, you absolutely want our crew on your boat.

This is me!

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