Our last few days have been a little strange. On Wednesday, we officially started our dive master training. I’m grateful that we did the parts I was most dreading, swim skills, first.
One set of tasks to become a dive master requires you to be able to demonstrate certain swim skills: a 400 yard timed swim, a 800 yard timed swim with snorkel and fins, and a fifteen minute float\tread water with your hands out of the water for the last two minutes. I had been worrying about a 400 yard swim for weeks, to the point that I took swim lessons thinking it would help. It didn’t. We did the swim in the ocean in front of the dive shop. There was about two feet of chop and a 15 knot wind, but we survived and completed the skill. Phew. Roger got the highest possible score and I got the second. Once I got my mask and fins, the 800 yard snorkel was just fun. I won that race.
Then Thursday, we spent three hours in a pool practicing demonstrating skills. This was my first indication that this Scuba thing could be as hard as real work. It’s cold and tiring and we have to do it again next week. As Roger said, more yoga.
Yoga Utila is maybe my favorite place on the island so far. I’ve never had such a challenging and rewarding yoga workout. The classes are run by a wonderful woman from Glasgow (imagine that accent directin your downward dog) that allows you to push or relax as much as sweating through 90 minutes of yoga in 85 degrees allows. After yoga Friday, we headed to a local bar called La Cueva (its cave-like appearance no doubt lends it the name) for pub quiz. We won and made new friends by using our prize money to buy shots for the bar.
Today, I was the dive master in training on two dives for actual paying customers. Rog is assisting an instructor with a new open water student. He had four hours in the pool yesterday and got sunburned, but had two great dives today, including seeing three spotted eagle rays.
Now, demonstrating just how weird and fantastic Utila is, we are eating dinner in a dive called Skidrow, known for late night drunken debauchery, before heading to the beach for a concert and laser light show. I’ll try to add video to this post later. Dive master training might be challenging, but sunshine, saltwater, cheap rum, and laser light shows make every day a good one.
I took video of the laser light show at the beach, but it wasn’t easy to see what was happening. We then attended the laser light show at the events center, the guys we were instructing were putting it on, so I got some better video there. It was early in the night, see R’s post about our bedtimes, so there are very few people dancing. But the lights were cool. Link to Youtube video here.