This past weekend started the adventure filled open water diver course for Kristen, Nick and I. It was a fun and exhausting weekend.
The festivities started on Friday night, with a classroom review of the book we had to read, at 5:30 pm, ending at about 10pm with a quick lesson on assembling our BCDs. Our instructor, Dan, was long winded with his stories at times, but they were amusing to hear, and he had such a laid back attitude that we were soon at ease. There were a total of nine of us in the class. Four were a group that would be traveling to Honduras in February, and two solo guys, Nate, who would eventually be included in our K-N-J buddy formation, and Charlie, a kid with a killer mullet.
The next morning we gathered at the Brainerd High School pool at 8:45 am, equipment in tow. There was a new addition to our class who Kristen quickly snatched up as a buddy. She was ten. We assembled our BCDs again, donned our wetsuits, and took our first plunge into the pool for our first confined dive. We covered basic skills in the shallow end. Removing, replacing and clearing our masks was one of the things I was most anxious about, but it turned out to be quite simple. Toward the end of class Dan gave us free reign of the pool. I struggled with my buoyancy a bit, but as I found out the next day I was very overweighted. After the scuba portion of the day concluded, we swam the required 200 meters, dried off and headed out for lunch. We stopped at Taco Johns, hit up a convenience store for some goodies, and headed back to the classroom. Once there we covered the rest of the book, took our final exam and headed out to Zorbaz for some zza. Fatigued from the day we hit they hay before 10 pm.
Sunday morning we met back at the pool at 8:30 am. Joining Dan was Mark, a divemaster who would be assisting in the remainder of the pool activities. We had a brief free for all in the deep end again. We also were properly weighted. I went from the original 16 lbs to 6 lbs. After that neutral buoyancy was a breeze. We learned some more vital skills, and repeated the skills from the day before in the deep end. We did our required 10 minutes of treading water and were out of there by 2 pm, then back in the classroom at 2:30 to grade the final exam. Kristen & I both got 49/50. Nick got 48/50. Ha ha ha ha. It’s because he couldn’t cheat off of me anymore.
After the classroom was all completed we headed out for our first two open water dives.
…to be continued