Rescue diver course in Pez maya!

Hello from Pez Maya! It’s week 6 which is truly insane especially for the 10 weekers, as the time is passing by so quickly! As we reached the end of the 5 week mark and some people were leaving whilst others arrived, we took a long weekend in Playa Del Carmen. It was great fun and we all got some much needed rest and a little time back in civilization.

However, come Monday we were all back and ready to carry on with our work here. Since we were gone 4 new volunteers have joined the team which is really great and nice to have some new faces on base. The work we`ve been focusing on has mainly been to continue our practice monitoring. Hopefully this time next week we’ll be ready to do the monitoring properly and start gathering data.

Aside from this, some of us are hoping to do our Divemaster whilst were here in Pez Maya and part of this course requires us to be trained in rescue diving. Recue diving trains you to be able to handle in water emergencies, from tired divers, injuries, distressed divers, unconscious divers and so on. Diving can be quite risky, not matter where you are or who you’re with, so it’s great to know that from this course, we’ll have to skills to help prevent or manage these situations, should they ever occur. So, on Wednesday after we’d studied the first few chapters of the Rescue Diver manual, we had a practical session in the water. It started with the basics, out of air situations, what to do if you have to tow a tired diver back to shore etc.

Then we moved on to, how to deal with a panicked diver… It was great fun being a panicked diver when we were going through the exercises, as we got to splash, scream and shout a lot. However, we had 3 members of staff with us, Nikki, Ed and Martin. Nikki is petite and relatively easy to maneuver in the water. Martin and Ed on the other hand are a fair bit bigger and stronger than some of us (me at 5”2 in particular), so when they jumped on top of us, pulled our masks off and tried to drown us for 2 hours, it was pretty exhausting work to say the least. Never the less, all of us had a fantastic time and learnt so much, even if we were completely worn out by the end of it, at least we all slept well last night! I’m really looking forward to our next lesson, unfortunately we had to miss it today due to bad weather, but I’ll make sure to cover it in next week’s blog.

Cheers all Caz!

Rescue diver course in Pez maya!