Dear Diary

Welcome back for diary entry number two as we lay out what is involved in the shorter version of our PADI Divemaster course. For those that missed it and are interested, you can catch up on what they've done so far here.

As big believers of the old term 'practice makes perfect', we've done rescue scenarios every day to try and get theses as polished and smooth as possible. The better and more confident folks are, in a relaxed practice scenario, the more likely to provide adequate rescues in a high stress, real life situation (much as they hopefully never need it). After team efforts last week, we moved on to individual rescues this week, with Solan and Marjorie rescuing each other (which is slightly nicer than having to haul 2metre tall Rob out). This was much better than last week, as they both got more and more confident with the techniques. After a few days of individual efforts, we got the guys to team up again on Thursday to rescue Margot, as she preteneded to be unresponsive whilst underwater. If you'd like to learn how to carry out these diver rescues yourself, check out our course here.

Day one this week involved some certified diver workshops alongside the rescue practice, followed by some timed tired diver tows. Both Solan and Marjorie smashed these, with just a couple of pointers on positioning whilst guiding to maintain control and make life easier. Some slightly wild weather on day two and some pretty woeful visibility, where you could only see a couple of meters, meant that after a bit of skill circuit practice in the morning, we decided to stay on the surface for the afternoon. A timed 800m snorkel which we decided to do around around the SS Reginald followed some skin diving efforts, which are far from easy in a drysuit despite Solan making it look like it here!

Day 3 involved some more workshops, where we got the guys to pracitce all elements of a diving day, starting off with brieifing the divers before leading the dives. Always a fun one for us instructors, as we get to pretend to be naughty students, picking up on anything missed during the briefings or how much they looked around in the water. After this, Margot was pretending to be on her first ever dive on the Discover Scuba Diver workshop. We do all of these in the sea one on one, so it was a really good lesson in positioning and methods for controlling a diver which they both did really well at despite Margots' best efforts!

We finished off the week with the final few skills of the skill circuit, before carrying out a bit of knot tying. Alongside all of this, we've been busy doing more beach cleans and making each dive a Dive Against Debris to try and do as much as we can. Margot has managed to remove about 11 bags worth of rubbish from the shore at Barrier 1. Whilst in the water we got a number of bits of fishing line as well as a couple of plastic bags and a car matt!

A couple of well earned days off for the guys now to work on their Emergancy Action Plans before we get back to it on Monday to work on some mapping dives and finish off the last few bits for their PADI Divemaster course.