Posts Tagged ‘Japan’

For the first time in a while I have some diving to report, and for the first time in even longer, some dive instruction.  Last weekend I was chatting to a couple of my friends and they were saying Okinawa is great, but they’d done everything there was to do.  I instantly called their bluff and asked them about diving, as Okinawa is one of the best places around to do it.  They quickly replied that they weren’t very good swimmers, which is an all-too-common preconception about SCUBA Diving.  For the Open Water course, you do have to complete a 200m swim and 10-minute float in a pool environment to qualify for the certification.  But for the Discover Scuba Diving “experience” you don’t need to be able to swim at all!  The main reason for this is that the instructor will be in direct contact with you 100% of the time.  In my case, I usually do that by holding the hand or BCD of the students at all times, and is also the reason why I don’t take more than 2 students on this experience at the same time.

After learning you didn’t have to be a good swimmer, they quickly said they wanted to try it, and proposed last Monday at Cape Maeda.  Ironically, I’d said to my main dive buddy a few days before that there is no way I was going to dive between August 22nd and 25th because of it being Obon in Okinawa.  This is a festival where the spirits of your ancestors come back, and is a big event in Japan.  But one of the things you are told is that you should never go into the water as the spirits will pull you down or do similarly unpleasant things.  I didn’t know this in my first year in Japan and went diving right in the middle of this festival.  I didn’t see any ghosts or anything, but it was just one of those dives where nothing seems to go right.  It was a dive site we knew well but we still managed to get lost and had a huge surface swim at the end.  Someone had equipment problems, and another had mask problems.  Now I’m not a big believer in the supernatural, but a couple of days later when someone expressed their shock that I’d dived in Obon, I decided that it was probably not to upset whatever might be out there so vowed to not do it again.  But when 2 people want to dive (and yes, they were female which is what you’re probably all thinking!) then how could I refuse?!

Monday was a warm day with temperatures in the low 30s and the sun blazing down inbetween heavy showers.  But I met the students (one of whom came with her husband, a PADI Rescue Diver).  They were both nervous but I did my best to reassure them them that there was nothing to be scared about and that they would be fine.  It seemed to work and they donned their wetsuits and equipment.  Have to say I was very impressed with how few complaints there were about the heat within the wetsuit or the weight of the equipment.  So kitted out and after a briefing about the skills we would do before we dived- we headed down the infamous Maeda steps…

The water was bathwater warm, around 32C at the surface, and with just a little surface chop.  There were plenty of people there, but all mainlander tourists, whose own Obon was the previous week.  We managed to find a quiet spot though to cover the breathing, regulator recovery & mask clearing exercises.  Both students performed very well on these, although on the mask clearing one of them was complaining that even after clearing some water was getting into her mask.  She tried changing with my mask which fitted her a little better, but still wasn’t completely happy.  We descended slowly to around 5m, equalizing our ears and mask as we went down and making sure we were all in close contact.  After around a minute or 2 one of the students gave me the “let’s ascend” hand signal.  I quickly got into eye contact with her to make sure she wasn’t panicking and could see she was calm.  So we all went up to the surface slowly and safely.

One of the best and first things things you should do if a student seems to have a problem is to establish eye contact with them.  First of all it allows you to look into their eyes and see if they are about to panic and liable to act unpredictably.  But it also allows the student to see you, and hopefully see that you are calm and fully in control of the situation.  I’ve found that goes a long way into making a potentially dangerous situation a calm procedure where everyone is comfortable with what is happening.  On surfacing the student told me that water was getting into her mask and even after clearing it was still coming in.  While she could do the mask clearing exercise, the said the deeper she went the more uncomfortable she became, as she was worried lots of water would come in and she would be unable to clear her mask.  It’s a psychological hurdle that many divers have to get over, and while she tried with different masks, after a few attempts during which we did swim around a little, we had to abort the dive.  The student in question felt bad, despite having one of the best diving skills you can possess: a cool head.  The other student was performing very well too, and she was the weaker swimmer of the two.  The diver with mask problems stated that if she could get comfortable breathing in a pool environment she would be much happier, but she did want to try it again.  That made me feel very happy, as an unsuccessful first experience can turn many people off diving, but I am glad she was determined to come back and try again.

So despite not having a full “experience”, it was great to get into the ocean and help people experience breathing underwater for the first time.  Hopefully they will return soon and they’ll be well on their way to becoming hooked on the world under the waves.

Before I go, a big thanks to Chris from travel67.com for helping with the photo editing on the shot above.  Came out pretty well