GVI Community, marine and environmental programs in Mexico

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Laguna Azul Rescue Diver Blog

When we aren’t able to dive due to the weather, the staff always come up with a fun and interesting ‘Plan B’. Today was one of those days, and four of us who are working towards our Rescue Diver got to go to the Laguna Azul near Bacala. A beautiful 45km-long freshwater lake, sparkling clear and ranging in colour from palest aqua to deep indigo.

We packed up all the equipment we needed into the Nissan plus shampoos and shower gels as there were hot showers at the lagoon which we were very excited about! After a stop at a local supermarket to buy ham and cheese for lunch, we arrived at a small secluded campsite right on the lake, from which we would be doing our rescue exercises.

We kitted up into our dive gear and Dave briefed us on the first exercise – search patterns. It was boys versus girls, and Kurt and Jimmy had to ‘hide’ in the lagoon whilst Amber and I conducted an underwater search. The visibility was bad making this quite a challenge but also highlighting the importance of good underwater navigation.

After 15 mins of searching we surfaced to find that we must have missed the boys by a couple of metres! Now it was our turn to hide… Amber and I spent our 20 mins at the bottom of the sandy lake having a little snooze, twiddling our thumbs and doing the hokey cokey. Luckily Kurt and Jimmy were no better at finding us.

We then had lunch and after too many yummy sandwiches, got back in the water all feeling rather bloated.

Our next task was to rescue an unresponsive diver underwater, bringing them to the surface with a controlled ascent, checking their breathing and giving rescue breaths whilst de-kitting the victim and ourselves and towing them to the shore – all this demonstrated beautifully by Gen and Dave. Kurt took the exercise a little further by hauling an unresponsive Jimmy up onto the jetty in a hilarious but rather painful manner! After de-briefing, we then got to have our hot showers and headed back to base, cleaner and more confident of our rescue skills.