OWSI to MSDT by any means possible

Well it’s that time once again; we’ve reached the beginning of the end. Having but 5 days left on the island of Utila before we head off to Roatan for a couple of days, and then continuing on our way back home, I thought it may be the time to look back over the last couple of months and try to summarise.

So where to begin? Well the obvious place is with the objective of the trip: MSDT! As it stands we are both Open Water Scuba Instructors with 5 Speciality Instructor ratings each and over 20 student certifications. The requirement to be a Master Scuba Diver Trainer is 25 certs so we are both a couple shy of target with a few days to go. As it stands with the rotation I think Chris should make it but I might end up a few short.

Ultimately though we agreed very early on that it was gonna be some hard yakka if we were even going to get close. To put it in perspective in the last 7 weeks I have done 10 courses (at times running 2 separate courses on the same day) and currently have 22 certifications to my name. In that time I have taken a total of 9 days off. What we came for was teaching experience and experience of working in the dive shop and that we have most certainly acquired. The simple logistics of running an Open Water course in 3 days would have been well beyond either of us at the start of this trip. Now however we can run courses efficiently and also make it as much fun for the students as possible.

So all-in-all the trip is a success, but more than that; we wanted to experience different diving conditions and different dive practices. I guess if you go to new destinations you’re always going to see something new, whether it be a simpler way of doing one particular aspect of a course, or maybe something that is made more complicated than it needs to be. Then there are other environmental considerations to take into account. As a result of seeing some different conditions and being in a new teaching environment I think I can speak for both of us when I say that we feel more confident in all aspects of our diving, teaching, and general decision-making on the boats or around the shop.

Apart from all that, we simply wanted to go diving every day and somehow we managed to drag ourselves out of bed every morning to do just that. Funnily enough wild horses couldn’t drag me into an office before 8:30 of a morning, but I’ll be down the shop by 6:30 and loading tanks onto the boat without a care in the world. There’s just something about this lifestyle that gets you out of bed every morning. As a case in point earlier on this week I checked the time on my watch and realised it was 9 o’clock on a Monday morning, I was 30m below the surface and I had just seen a hawksbill sea turtle. For some reason the idea of going back to an office job just doesn’t appeal.

Of course the nature of the diving lifestyle means that from time-to-time you have to say goodbye to friends that you’ve made along the way. Ultimately, most people aren’t as lucky as we are and can’t stay more than a few days to do their open water course. For those that stay a bit longer and do their Divemaster they may be here for 6 weeks or so. This means that roughly every 6 weeks there’s a new group of people coming through UDC, especially at the moment. With Christmas on the horizon there’s a lot of people that are leaving in the next few weeks, so it’s just about the right time to leave ourselves . This isn’t a new phenomenon, the same thing happened in Thailand where we did our training and I daresay that it will continue for as long as we stay in the industry. We’ve made a great many friends here, and I hope that we’ll be able to stay in contact and find a few of them in some other remote, exotic location.

All-in-all I think with the exception of the MSDT rating (which was admittedly the point of the trip………..and the blog) we’ve achieved all we wanted to and maybe found a bit more on the way. To be honest I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like the excitement on an open water student’s face when you take them on their first open water dives. Somehow I knew I would like teaching, but I’ve been diving for so long that I forgot quite how new and exciting it feels to make bubbles for the first time, and for that it was worth every cent.

Here’s a few random pictures we haven’t posted yet:

Seahorse under the UDC dock:

Starfish:

Bubbles from a dive at the Pinnacles - one of the best sites here on the island.

Stay cool

Loz

Joined a class on the wreck dive, for the hell of it – Holliburton 210.

Holliburton Wreck:

Safety Stop

The weather seems quite changeable, well it is the rainy season I suppose but hell I here and I want it to be sunny. The hurricane season officially ended on 20th Nov and that usually indicates the start of better things …well not this season.

That in itself not so much a problem as it’s still warm and you get wet diving anyway but the disruption it causes to general life, the supply ship and ferry don’t run so fresh food quickly disappears and there are no new students wanting to learn to dive – everything starts to feel really small.

It does disrupts everything including communication – TV, internet & phones it is all satellite based and the down pours drown out even the strongest of signals.. the only TV channels left are the religious ones perhaps that says something.
We did spend a good few hours hiding from the rain playing a long game of Monopoly in the local café, Bundu’s, over a couple of beers.. a good evening but I lost.

Hiding from the rain at UDC:

More later.

Have managed to dive on several sites now around Utila, actually circumnavigating the island one day as it was shorter to go all the way round. Diving is all from boats with plenty of marked sites with buoys generally at 5m on the edge of drop offs/ walls making navigation reasonably straight forward.

Not a great deal of commentary here but thought would list the sites I've managed to dive here so far and upload a selection of photos.

1. Moon Hole

2. Airport Caves

3. Ships Stern
4. Pinnacles (North Side)

5. Ron’s Wreck

6. Halliberton 210 Wreck
7. Aquarium

8. Black Hills

9. Blackish Point

10. Labyrinth

11. Black Coral Wall

12. Silver Garden
13. Ted’s Point

14. Lighthouse Reef
15. Jack Neil’s Beach

16. Little Bight

17. Spotted Bay

18. Rocky Bay

19. Iron Bound

20. Mitchells Point
21. Big Rock Beach

22. Linda’s Wall
23. Jacks Bight

24. Laguna Beach – one way dive from Black Coral Wall

Cheers Big Ears

In the absence of having witty anecdotes to write about other than perhaps Lawrence’s moral dilemma what to do upon noticing a nipple ring showing do you:

a) ignore and continue loading tanks on the boat
b) stop and bring attention to the fact the nipple ring is showing
or c) stop and cover up.

Answer please by comment on blog.

We have had to make a couple of decisions to make to be MSDT Instructors we needed to select 5 specialities to teach, so which of the 22 specialties to teach:

1. Altitude Diver _____
2. Atlantis/Dolphin Rebreather* _____
3. AWARE Fish ID _____
4. Boat Diver _____
5. Cavern Diver* _____
6. Deep Diver _____
7. Digital U/W Photographer _____
8. Diver Propulsion Vehicle _____
9. Drift Diver _____
10. Dry Suit Diver _____
11. Enriched Air* _____
12. Equipment Specialist* _____
13. Ice Diver _____
14. Multilevel Diver _____
15. U/W Naturalist _____
16. U/W Navigator _____
17. Night Diver _____
18. Ray Rebreather* _____
19. Search & Recovery Diver _____
20. U/W Photographer _____
21. Underwater Videographer _____
22. Wreck Diver _____

• Documentation Required

Being purely selfish I want to maximise spend, complicated a bit as I have accrued enough experience in several dive areas to self certify – you can self certify once you have taught several students (25). So far so good am doing lots of diving (finished 85th dive since being here) and have now got all the 5 speciality instructor stuff out of the way which is good. I have chosen to do specialties 7,8,11,19 & 22, albeit I can self cert in 22 on experience already. Once I take out the one’s I was going to self cert the list is restrictive within Utila, not a lot of Ice, Dry Suit diving to be had.

Just need to get on some courses now, having shadowed 1 course for practice but the last course I was teaching I didn’t do the certifying dive because Ed (Staff Instructor) insisted I attend the theory lesson of Search & Recovery. Just need to get on some more classes (my previous class only had 3 students) so hopefully I can get a couple of bigger classes for my next rotations.

UDC prepare people slightly differently, no-one during their course(s) OW to OWSI does specialty diver training unlike Mermaids so no-one has any specialities – Lawrence and I have 11 between us. UDC could develop more specialty certifications through the school if they included some within the package and qualify Master Scuba Divers before qualifying divers as Divemasters.

The theory session of the instructor specialty is to do the knowledge of the speciality (as you would get having the speciality already). The practical session is the diving and teaching practise of how you would go about instructing a class.

Evenings are spent finding food and having a couple of beers, with whoever is around, as you would expect we have a real Blokes fridge, which could have presented a problem had the supply ship not arrived when it did as we were down to our last beers and we had run out of eggs, bread and water. Lawrence has been along to a couple of Salsa classes albeit I’m not sure much Salsa is undertaken….

I of course do not embark in such depravity .... I have two left feet.

UDC Instructing Staff - no they look like this most of the time.

Cheers Big Ears

Bereft of a good travelling story of hardship, challenge and huge delays, well thinking about it that’s not entirely true on the journey to the dive centre one morning it did get a little gnarly as the rain the previous night had flooded across the road not leaving a dry route to walk– meaning you had to tip toe along the edge to avoid getting your feet wet!!!!! I didn’t sign up for that.

Utila Dive Centre and dock

We are doing our best to assimilate into the local community; you know the thing “you don’t need to know who I am just get on with it!” “move aside Johnny foreigner don’t you know what passport this is!” – this only seemed to just get odd looks so we have adapted our approach and are now doing our utmost to blend in. This is not as easy as it might sound when most of the time you feel like you are visiting Lilliput. It must be the diet or something.

A morning nursing a coffee, waiting for breakfast we witnessed rush hour in Utila, total bedlam!!

Main Street Grid Lock

Well there have been several requests for images of our accommodation, so herewith a couple of shots. The location was chosen for the commute to work, some mornings we need to be there by 06:30HRS, YES that’s 0’clock as in ‘oh that’s early!!’ to prep the boat equipment etc it’s not all gravy.

The commute is a full 6 minutes accepting you don’t get caught up in gnarly puddles on the way in and then it’s 6 ½ minutes. However over the road there is a supermarket which has all the staples you might need milk, fags, beer and Snack Pots (bright red or orange jelly things – which is a surprisingly good snack in a pot!)

What you do have to keep an eye on is the best before date. On occasions the goods must rattle around on the journey to the island and the dates get erased and the customer service policy reminds me of a time I ordered a full breakfast at a café but requested that they omit the baked beans, when I received my plate there were beans on it, on reminding them that I had requested no beans the response was simple ‘to late they’re on the plate!’ U.T.I.L.A

Other amenities in our immediate vicinity are… well actually the hole of down town is in our immediate vicinity so half a dozen eateries, medical store, couple of street stalls, 5 churches, an ATM and couple of places to stay. We live in the centre of the throbbing metropolis of Utila Town.

The power and water are insatiably linked and there seems to be a lot of regular maintenance to the power supply but this is U.T.I.L.A and you just roll with the punches. However there must be more than one circuit, having sat in the bar at UDC waiting for the power to come back someone comes in and says the town still has power – dam you power company I could have been sat back at the apartment showered and with electric!!

As mentioned in our previous note Team photographer Murphy (this is completely by default since he’s the only one with a camera!!) continues to do his best in cataloguing all the beauties on the island as much as the beauty of the island itself.

ON a couple of forays out we have stumbled across a drinking establishment in a tree – no joke it is a big tree house!! This is only really possible without notable health and safety regulations. We happened across the age old ceremony of the Divemasters final exams ….. to a level of demonstration quality the aspiring (still not yet DM) has to drink copious amounts of alcohol through their snorkel. The difficult bit being you have a mask on too and can’t breathe. As always this generally finishes with the prospective DM blast clearing the snorkel another valid technique but leaves the others in a wide proximity covered in the concoction being drunk.

Cheers