Before I left for Mexico a good friend of mine who is a divemaster and a professional dive photographer said his favorite diving course was the rescue diver course. A number of other dive instructors and divemasters here in Mexico said the same thing. So I decided to take the class.
However, nature had a different opinion. I was first scheduled to take it in early October. I promptly completed my necessary online classes. Hurricane Delta came through. I rescheduled it for early November. Then came hurricane Zeta. So we delayed it a week. That week ended up with high wind conditions (no relation to any hurricanes) and the boats couldn’t go out. I was able to get my first two days of the course done in a sheltered cenote, but it was still windy and rainy those days. I wasn’t able to complete my final open water session until yesterday, a full week after completing the first two classes. Everyone was joking that it was the longest rescue diver course in history.
So what’s involved in this course? A number of exercises, most of which I realized I don’t want to ever have to do in the future.
I know most of you won’t be that interested in this, but I thought I’d list below the various exercises I went through as a reminder to myself what we did. This is my blog after all 😊!
- Practicing CPR on land with a dummy. First hear, see and feel whether he’s breathing, then give 30 pushes and check again. Continue until he responds or until the paramedics arrive.
- Understanding the difference between personal awareness, global awareness, situational awareness
- Picking two reference points before you dive: one where you’re at and one where you plan to end up.
- A rapid ascent where you go up to the surface in a rapid but controlled ascent without your regulator in your mouth
- Deploying a surface buoy, which took me four attempts to get right initially. I kept not properly releasing the spool the line was on and going part of the way up with the buoy. I was told that I definitely wasn’t the first person to have that problem!
- Practicing multiple forms of underwater navigation to find a lost item at the bottom
- Moving someone to shore or to a boat using a couple of methods
- A 600+ meter open water swim test
- Dealing with an uncomfortable diver underwater by calming him down and then guiding him by the shoulder for a while until he’s comfortable again
- Dealing with a panicked diver underwater. This included fending him off with your arm, pushing his regulator to show him he still has air to calm him down, putting his arm on your BCD (buoyancy control device) strap and then doing a regular ascent to the surface, including deploying the surface buoy.
- Dealing with a comatose diver underwater who still has his regulator in his mouth. First I was supposed to wave my hand in front of him, then shake him, then get behind him while holding his regulator in my hand so that I could inflate his BCD and get both of us to the surface
- Dealing with a comatose diver underwater who does not even have his regulator in the water. This was a bit more of a violent exercise. You rapidly cover his mouth with your left hand to make sure no water gets in his mouth thrust him up with both hands and rapidly ascend to the surface.
- Dealing with a panicked diver on the surface of the water. The key is to get behind the diver without letting him grab you and pulling you under in his panicked state. The first technique is to reach across quickly with your right hand to his left shoulder and quickly turn him around. The second is to descend a bit, swim to him underwater, grab his leg above the knee, spin him quickly and then surface behind him. Once behind him you make sure his BCD is inflated, pin your knees between his tank, calm him down verbally and then pull him to shore or to the boat.
- Surface rescue breathing where you have an unconscious diver at the surface. This entails keeping his head up and every 4 seconds pinching his nose and giving him a rescue breath. In the 4 second gaps between breaths you take both his and your gear off in the same sequence as you pull him to shore or a boat. We used a buoyant life sized dummy to do this. In honor of the recent hurricane that passed by we christened it Zeta.
- Pull an inert diver to the dock. Here you spin him around on his stomach, cross his hands on the dock and put your weight on his wrists. This keeps him inert and safe while you exit the water on the dock. Then you grab his wrists with your opposite hands, dip twice to get momentum and then pull him and twist him around as you pull him completely out of the water. The key is putting one hand behind his head as he comes down so that he doesn’t slam his head on the dock. My instructor asked a cute girl near the cenote entrance if she could be my dummy for this. She thought it would be fun (I’m not sure what he actually told her in Spanish!) but when we finally got to that part she was gone and another instructor ended up being my dummy for this, since the non-human dummy we used for the previous exercise wasn’t configured for this.
- Pull an inert diver on a boat. Here you spin him around until you and he are face to face, you have your arms under his shoulders, you take one leg on the bottom rung of the ladder between his legs and then lift him up the first step or two until someone on the boat can pull him up the rest of the way. We did this in the open ocean under pretty choppy seas and I did a great job of almost drowning my instructor on this drill!
- I did all these drills in a cenote and then on my third day I had to demonstrate most of these in the ocean.
It was obviously a valuable course, but I realized that I didn’t have any interest in moving forward to become a divemaster. I just wanted to continue enjoying recreational dives.
I couldn’t bring my GoPro on the course, so I’ve included some stock photos below of the kinds of things I had to do.
