Paul's Page

Hello everyone,

I think that some of you know but I would bet that a lot of you don’t so I thought I would write about it for a short bit.

Just recently I started teaching my first PADI Open Water Scuba class since getting instructor certified this past spring in Las Vegas/California. This class I am teaching a total of 6 people 3 of which are in group “A” and 3 of which are in group “B” to keep the water sessions small and to accomodate scheduling conflicts.

So far I have had three class room sessions, in our hotel actually, all of which went remarkably well and the friends/students I have all did really well. They even did very good with the dive charts which I was really happy about.

I have done three days of pool sessions so far, two with group “A” which covered all 5 sessions and one day with group “B” which covered 2 sessions. For those that don’t know a pool session is where I get in the water with the students and actually practically teach them the skills of diving, there are 5 total pool session that each student has to do. I have been combining some sessions together in order to get the class done in the amount of time we have before we leave this city and so we can make trips to better diving on our days off.

Today I took the group “A” and one from group “B” to the ocean for their first two Open Water dives. IT WENT FANTASTIC. I can’t be more enthusiastic for my students. The first true Open Water dive in this course is mearly a tour of the environment where I don’t do any skills with people and only show them around. Our first dive today went great. We had the students pretty appropriately weighted and everyone got to the bottom smoothly and without issue. After that we just went for a tour and it was a lot of fun. All of the students had GOOD boyuancy control (this is something that is VERY RARE) and we actually had a nice dive. There were some things to see, nothing great, but more than you see in a pool. Everyone came up after the dive with smiles.

After a short surface interval to change tanks and talk about the skills the students would have to do on the second dive we re-entered the water for our second dive. Again we got to the bottom and settled in on a nice spot of sand. Arguably one of the hardest skills in this class is the flooding and eventual removal of the mask. Today we did a partial flood and a full flood of each person’s mask and everyone did FANTASTIC. The person from group “B” who was joining us who had problems with these skills in the pool actually ROCKED them perfectly. They even managed to inhale a little bit of water during the skill and still stayed calm, coughed through it, cleared the mask and went on to do the next full flooding of the mask without hesitation, I was very proud. All of the other skills that were performed went extremely smooth. After we finished the skills portion of this dive we did another short tour where we were hoping to see the clown fish someone spotted on the first dive but he had moved on or was hiding

When we got to the surface we did a couple of optional skills and got out of the water at right around noon. This was great because everyone was able to get back to the dive shop, get the gear cleaned up, and off to the hotel in order to make it to work on time.

It was a good day. Upcoming I have another pool session with group “B” people on Sunday, I have another open Water Dive on Monday with the group “A” people from a boat after which they will be finished, then two beach dives with the group “B” people on Thursday and on the following Monday another boat dive but with the group “B” people and they will be finished.

I have to throw out a HUGE THANKS SO MUCH to my DiveMaster Yannick Chapados who has been helping me out throughout all of the pool and open water sessions. Without him I wouldn’t have been doing near as well. The other good thing about Yannick is that he has a small underwater camera that he brought to some of the later pool sessions and will be bringing to the boat dives. So hopefully starting tomorrow I will be putting those pictures up on my web site for people to see.

Hope everyone is doing well.
ttys