February 8 - Australia: Cairns, Queensland
OWSI - Open Water Scuba Instructor Course - Day 4
Today was an "off day" from running, so we slept in until 7:00ish and showed up for class at 8:30.
Morning Lecture
The first lecture of the day was "Teaching Children". PADI has a number of programs used to introduce young children to scuba diving. We had a little workshop to brainstorm good teaching approaches for kids under 12 and kids over 12. When Chookie pointed out that teenagers are sensitive about their body image, Dave (the witty Scotsman) had this to say: "So we shouldn't ask them if their suit it too tight or if their balls have dropped yet.". Chookie was laughing so hard that it took her a while to get her breath back.
Guest Speaker
We had a guest speaker named Chris Coxon from the Workplace Health and Safety Commission. He went through some of the "horror stories" in Queensland, but mostly spent the time discussing regulations. Queensland diving law is one of the strictest in the world, and often supercedes PADI standards in conservativeness and risk reduction. However, this also adds to the bureaucracy that we saw on Sea Quest. For example, each diver must record their dive time and max depth on the boat Dive Log and sign off on the numbers. Also, a manual roll-call must be conducted after each diver. Both of these regulations came about because of the Americans who were left off the reef a few years ago.
Lunch
After Chris's lecture, we broke for lunch. At home, I managed to get in touch with Monica to figure out what the story was with tonight. I also spoke with Thomas from "Northern Circuits" who had some good news about the laptop. Although our USB port is "very unique", he managed to get an old motherboard sent up from Townsville. He's going to replace our USB port with the "old" USB port. Pretty damn cool considering our alternative was a new $2000 motherboard. (Which, of course, is an alternative we wouldn't have used.). The downside is that we have to wait until Monday to get it back. That's a whole week without the laptop.
Afternoon Lectures
The afternoon's lectures were about the Dive master course and the Master Scuba Diver course. We're constantly teasing Vic - who is the businessman in the company - that they're always trying to sell us stuff. Everything they talk about "is available in the shop downstairs for a small nominal fee.". And we continue to joke that none of these things are offered at a discount. So he's turned it around on us. Whenever part of the lectures refer to us running our own dive operations, Vic will look at us with a smile and say, "Of course, you can offer this for a discount." And we all mumble "But not downstairs in the shop". And he'll grin a lopsided grin and say "Nope. This is your business we're talking about. Not mine!" Having said that, we've learned an awful lot about the business of diving from his stories and examples.
Evening Thunderstorms
At 6:30, we got in the pool for another round of confined water water presentations. We'd been in the water for awhile when the thunderstorms started. The rain came in torrential downpours against the tin roof about the pool. So we had to speak very loudly to be heard about the din. But the noise was nothing compared to the lightening show in the sky. We could see out the sides of the pool area intricate patterns of lightening. Since we were practicing some surface skills, we hung out and watched the show for a while. It was so beautiful to watch, that most of us stopped paying attention to the briefings and looked at the sky instead.
NOT my picture. But it looked a lot like this.
(This picture is from community.webshots.com)
Then, around 8:30, the lights went out.
We all sat there for a minute, attempting to figure out what happened. Then, the silly remarks started flying. "Oooh! A night dive!".... "Who's got a torch?".... "Hey! Don't touch me there!".... and "Who's bum is this?". We waited for 5-10 minutes to see if the power would be restored, but it wasn't happening. So we let our eyes get accustomed to the dark and disassembled and washed our kits in the pitch black. Jon and I dropped UK Jon and Tom off at their houses. We also dropped David off at the "Cock and Bull" - a pub around the corner from our house. David lives 1/2 block from DSDD, and using his Scottish logic decided "No electricity at home. I might as well hit the pub and down a few drinks!" Perfectly rational, if you ask me!
Monica and Martin
Monica and her boyfriend Martin were due to arrive in Cairns at 9:00. Since we didn't know when we were getting out of class we told them to go go the "Cock and Bull" and we'd meet them there. By 9:30, they hadn't arrived and we figured their plane had been delayed by the storms. So we drove to the airport just as their flight landed and we met them at the gate. We were all "sort of hungry", so we found a place that was still open at 10:30PM and ordered some chicken wraps. It was great to get caught up, and I'm looking forward to the next few days with them.