Luckily for my sanity, the course includes a lot of physical activity (otherwise I'd just happily bury myself in books and that would be the end of it for sure). For example, in the past couple of days I had to learn:
How to search and recover an object underwater
It was pretty fun. I was on the team of 3 people and we had to find an object – a weight – underwater at the Villa Aldora, tie it to a lift bag using one of the three knots that we were supposed to learn beforehand and bring it to the shore. It took us 39 minutes to actually find the object, so thorough was our search patternJ. And we messed up the route a bit, because our navigator buddy decided to change the course from 360/180 to 300/120 for some reason, so instead of going perpendicular to the shore in a more "compact" pattern, we were doing it pretty much diagonally. Oh well. We did not mess up the knots though! Which was nice, because for some reason I had a really hard time getting it when testing my skills on a real rope before the dive. It was strange, because when I practiced on my robe tie the other day at home, I was super comfortable with each of the required knots. Go figure…
How to tie knots
If for whatever reason you want to learn how to tie knots professionally, here are some helpful websites that show the process step-by-step:
Try it when stressed out and frustrated. It has a good therapeutic power.
I also had to assist Liang in doing an OW course for Lukas – one of the German speaking Italian friends of hers. Man, teaching how to dive is pretty damn difficult (of course, I didn't do anything, just had to be there and demonstrate some skills on Liang's demand, but judging by the looks of it – very involved). And it takes a long time. But it must feel very rewarding as well. When we finished with the class, Lukas – who is a natural, really – was "shining like a polished samovar" (I'm sure you can tell that this is a Russian idiom for "looking happy"). And then we ate freshly "caught" sea urchins. It was delicious.
I was dreading the day of the "stamina test", because not only you have to perform some swimming skills on the surface (which is no problem for me), but you actually have to do it under a certain time to pass! And although I am very comfortable in the water and can stay afloat / swim forever, I don't really know any proper swimming techniques and I was sure I was very slow.
To be precise, during this test, you have to:
- Swim (no snorkel or fins) 400 meters under 6.20 minutes for 5 points, under 8 minutes for 4 points… and you have to just do it for 1 point;
- Perform a tired diver tow for 100 meters under 2 minutes for 5 points, under 3 minutes for 4 points, under 4 minutes for 3 points (and my God, this one is unexpectedly tough, all of us felt completely dead on arrival);
- Swim (with snorkel and fins) 800 meters under 10 minutes for 5 points, etc. (this one is still pending for me).
I was going for 1 point (just for doing it) on each of the timed exercises. So imagine my surprise when I actually got 4 points for the no-fins swimming (to be fair, I was still the last one, but I did it under 7.20 minutes!) and 4 points for the tired diver tow (I actually could have gotten 5, I came at 2.01)!!! It's so funny how little things like this make you happy. The realization that I'm actually not as physically-challenged as I thought I was gave me so much energy for the rest of the day that I could have surely moved some mountains (fortunately, the need for testing that never arose).
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