Finally we've booked onto our PADI Openwater course - starting tomorrow. It's the one target we set ourselves for the year and it now looks like we've run out of excuses not to do it. I wouldn't say I felt nervous but I would say I felt nervously excited. Unfortunately this means the next two days are spent in a classroom and a swimming pool. An unexpected shock concerned the fact that we've been given a textbook to revise from and only a few hours to learn the initial 200 pages. A reminder of the darker days at school and there isn't even a Letts Revise book to skip through rather than read the entire real thing!
Days 151 - 152 - Airlie Beach (PADI Course)
An interesting group of scuba students ranged from the immensely cocly English public school boy to the shy but sweet Korean girl who was too short to stand in the shallow end of the pool, from the non-English Speaking (a problem in an english classroom) palest person ever to a middle-aged allegedly English speaking Canadian (he hasn't said a word yet). The classroom was predictably dull (Kirsty slept through most of the first day's ordeal) and although there is a supposed pass/fail mark in the final exam, in reality they just tell the people where they went wrong, give them the correct answers and get them to do the test again. Not that Kirsty and I needed such treatment obviously. The pool skills were generally simple enough but I will admit having difficulty in one - the CESA (Controlled Emergency Swimming Ascent). Basically you have to take at least 30 seconds to swim 9 metres while constantly saying "Ahhhhhhh". My problems derived from lung capacity rather than anything else and I was more than a little relieved to complete that part. Next to the CESA, the worst part was spending nearly five hours constantly in a cold pool on a cold day - truly one of those moments whn you wish you were a child again and oculd get away with crying about howmuch you wanted to get out.
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