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Published: October 25th 2006
The PADI Open Water certification class of 15th October 2006 on Scuba Pro 1
(L to R) Me, Claudius, Lars, Nils, Kolya, Severin, Erik, Maaike (my second dive buddy), Warren (instructor), Christian, Henri, Alex, Teresa (instructor), Denise, Dennis, Mitsuyo, Phil (my first dive buddy), Debbie, Japanese guy whose name I never caught, Paul, K (instructor)I couldn't come to Australia and not see the Great Barrier Reef. I also couldn't come to the Great Barrier Reef and simply snorkel it. Scuba was the only way to go so, with some trepidation, I booked myself onto a 5 day course that would hopefully culminate in me being awarded PADI Open Water Certification - a licence to dive anywhere in the world to a depth of 18m.
By choosing to go with a company called Pro-Dive in Cairns, I'd opted for possibly the most expensive operator and location possible, but Pro-Dive's reputation preceded them. They were also the only company in Cairns offering a liveaboard boat for the sea-based 3 days of the course - other outfits ferried their customers in and out each day, making for large amounts of travelling and increased potential for seasickness.
The first 2 days of the course were spent in Pro-Dive's training centre. The group was 16-strong for the classroom sessions though we were split into 2 groups of 8 for the pool work (and later the ocean dives). The instructor proved to be a little impatient but knew his stuff. The nationality breakdown was 7 Germans, 4 Brits, 2
Swedes, 1 Dutchwoman, 1 South African, and 1 Aussie, which was fairly representative of the tourist population of the east coast as a whole, from what I've seen so far.
The classroom sessions covered diving theory, in particular buoyancy and how to control it, plus assorted other topics, e.g. how to ensure you don't build up dangerous levels of nitrogen in your blood by diving too deep/long. A test at the end of day 2 ensured we had remembered at least some of it, but it was hardly taxing.
Of much more interest were the pool sessions, and not just because they were generally conducted under an overcast sky with rain falling, leading to us shivering in the shallow end. It was a little difficult practising skills in the pool, as there wasn't an enormous amount of room so people kept getting in the way. Your restricted field of view when wearing a mask, as well as the light distortion under water, contributed to this also.
There were 2 points about scuba diving that worried me. One was the whole idea of having to rely on a piece of equipment to enable me to breathe, unlike the
trusty old mouth and lungs that I've been using with some success on land for the last 3.5 decades. This turned out to not be a big deal, the only thing to remember being that you must get used to not breathing through your nose - this proved to be especially tempting for the mask-off activities, leading to me having a minor choking attack more than once.
The other issue was how I should deal with my contact lenses. Though you can get masks with prescription lenses, they're an investment that a beginner is unlikely to make, so I chose to leave my contacts in. For the exercises where we had to partly flood, fully flood, or remove our masks under water, I had to simply close my eyes, which added an extra element of excitement to the process. It's surprisingly easy to clear a flooded mask - you simply look upwards, hold on to the top of your mask, and blow out through your nose. An average mask only needs a quarter of a lungful of air to clear it.
There is a buddy system in diving where you never dive alone - always with a buddy.
Your buddy helps you put on your equipment and checks that you haven't omitted any vital steps, and you do the same for them. When diving, you stay within easy swimming distance of each other - if for whatever reason either of you runs out of air then you need to be able to reach each other quickly. Your buddy also acts as an extra pair of eyes, alerting you to any dangers or (more hopefully) interesting things to see. Another English guy, Phil, was my buddy for the first part of the course.
Included in our course fee, and intended as preparation for anyone going to the reef, was a ticket to Reef Teach, a 2 hour presentation conducted by a lunatic Irish marine biologist. There was a good deal of information in the show, but it was presented in such a manic fashion that the medium often obscured the message. However the fish groupings did stick in my head and were probably the most useful thing for a beginning scuba diver to know anyway.
The journey out to the reef, on the morning of day 3 of the course, was an endurance test. I'd taken a
Group shot after being given our PADI Open Water certification
(L to R) Alex, Denise, Henri, Maaike, Phil, Erik, Lars, Random (not part of our group), me Kwell to hopefully prevent any seasickness, but the rolling of the ship in only a slightly choppy sea caused a feeling of nausea to gradually creep over me. I managed to remain vomit-free by taking large lungfuls of the ocean air and staring at the receding coastline, but there was at least one chunder incident - an arc right onto the dive deck, courtesy of the sole Scotsman on board. I was glad when we finally reached the mooring and the bobbing of the boat was at a minimum.
It was surprisingly comfortable on board, given the 33 people and crew on the boat. The other customers were a mix of abilities - some recently qualified, some experienced divers. I shared a cabin (bunk beds again) with Henri from my group. The lounge/dining room was the focal point of the boat, where most of the eating and socialising took place. The sundeck was also popular but, with the intensity of the sun being high, I made only fleeting appearances on it (and still managed to burn myself).
Over the 3 days we were lucky with underwater visibility at each of the 5 dive sites we visited, with 10m
the minimum (except of course for the night dive). This meant you could scan a wide area with minimal effort. With so many brightly coloured fish swimming around, and the coral aggregations appearing in a variety of shades and shapes, it was mesmerising simply watching the more mundane inhabitants of the reef go about their daily business. This meant that spotting something a little more exotic was even more thrilling, e.g. a turtle rummaging in seaweed, a white-tipped shark swimming menacingly but harmlessly nearby, a moray eel poking its oversized head out of a rock cleft, a school of large chevron barracuda hovering in a current, 5 stingrays within 30 seconds of each other, a clownfish (i.e. Nemo) frolicing in an anemone's fronds, or a giant potato grouper doing whatever the swimming equivalent of plodding is. Like on safari, you needed to see one of these things in the flesh before you could pick them easily, so after our first stingray we were seeing them all over the place.
The first dive we did at the reef was really an opportunity to get used to being in the ocean rather than in a swimming pool. It wasn't enormously successful
My room-mate Henri
Old enough for table-dancing on a personal level, as I'd forgotten to put on my socks so my fins were too loose, and I seemed to have developed a potentially fatal fascination with ingesting seawater. As a result, I was weary by the end of the dive and had been concentrating so hard on breathing and finning correctly that I'd noticed virtually nothing around me, and certainly not the shark and turtle that other members of the group had seen.
At the end of the dive, one of the Swedes was sick and it was grim the speed with which hordes of fish suddenly appeared and began to nibble at it.
The completion of the second dive of day 2 marked the final one we needed for certification, so once we were back on the boat we had a presentation ceremony. This was also a watershed moment in that it meant that, from now on, all our dives would be for fun and we no longer needed to stick together in a group. To showcase our new-found ability, it became obligatory to enter the water via a flashy forward roll entry instead of the more mundane giant stride entry we'd been doing
until then.
The final dive of day 2 was a night dive, which turned out to be a lot less exciting than I'd been hoping. We saw absolutely nothing, even with 8 of us shining torches everywhere. The experience of being in the sea at night was an odd one but not unpleasant. This dive was also with a new buddy, Maaike, due to Phil moving on to the Adventure Diver course.
For a couple of the dives we tagged along with 2 of the recreational divers on the boat who had both logged over 100 dives. It was instructive how effortless they made everything look, and their experience meant that they were able to spot interesting wildlife seemingly at will. As the instructor had promised us on day 1, buoyancy proved to be the hardest skill to master, and there were numerous incidents of beginners (names withheld) landing on the backs of other divers or rising up into them because they were both unable to control their buoyancy and insufficiently aware of their surroundings.
Our final day at the reef had a 6AM dive to kick off with - early morning dives are usually the most
productive, with the night creatures not yet in bed and the day ones coming out for breakfast. Maaike had hired a camera for this dive, and all the underwater and surface photos are hers - copyright Maaike Oldenhof. Two other dives followed in quick succession and then we headed back to Cairns.
It was good to have a proper shower back at the hostel, but there was one remaining part of the course to complete - namely, the end-of-course party starting at a restaurant on the Esplanade. Highlights of the evening - which frankly is something of an alcoholic blur - included the setting of a new Pro-Dive record for Jagermeister bombs consumed in one go (28), the appearance of Henri in a "Mr Backpacker " table-dancing contest (he came 2nd), and enough (non-table) dancing for me to sweat out all the alcohol I'd drunk until that point.
Thus my scuba diving course ended at 4AM with a weary stagger into my dorm (though I wasn't even the last to return - and this was a Monday night too). I'll be looking to add a few dives to my log book in the coming weeks, as the course
not only gave me a great sense of accomplishment due to the nerves I'd had initially, but this first exposure to the underwater world was an enormous thrill and left me wanting more.
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Mr Backpacker!
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Awesome site... Btw, it was 32 Jagerbombs (i think!)