Back to Teaching

The school year has started and our Friday night pool has followed suit and we have got off to a busy start with a new SEAL team getting underway and a brand new Open Water course starting. It seems like ages since I actually taught an Open Water course and I have to confess to a certain level of excitement at the prospect of taking brand new students through the process and creating some really competent divers at the end of it.

There are three students involved with a fourth that has done most of the work previously and will be dipping in to finish off and refine skills. They include a complete novice who first experienced a try dive at the Essex International Scout Jamboree this summer and one of the graduates from our very own SEAL team. From a teaching perspective that is tremendous because it provides a real mixture and I know that our SEALs have been able to race through the course having picked up most of the skills already.

At the time of writing I must confess we are already two sessions into the course. The first session went really well and it was evident that the students had done their homework on chapter one in their manual. A slight challenge was that Knowledge reviews had been done but the answers had not been written in the manual so we had to go through these before getting in the water.

Partial mask clear is the skill to watch out for in session one and as always I got the students practicing this on dry land before putting them in the water. It is such an easy skill when you get it but there is something about putting your face in the water and then having to blow through your nose with a regulator in the mouth that seems to confuse even the most rational persons brains at times. I am pleased to say everyone got this skill perfectly before we finished.

Session two was equally successful and this time the Knowledge Reviews were completed and good marks were achieved in the tests. This is great for me because it always gives us more time to brief the skills to be covered in the water. Session two has a lot in it but again everyone coped really well and especially with the experience of the out of air scenario.

My challenge was that following our second session I had to get on my way to the Farne Islands for a diving weekend so I had to get out and on the road very quickly in order to get the six hour journey underway. You might think that setting off at 8:30 pm to go to Northumbria is sheer madness and you would probably be right but you will need to make that conclusion only after reading the next blog entry on my weekend in the Farnes.