After spending 8 hours in the swimming pool on tuesday and a few hours on wednesday my hands were very wrinkly! What was I doing you ask..

Well as part of the divemaster exams you have to be able to demonstrate 21 key scuba skills so that you can be called upon by an instructor to demonstrate them to students. You have to have 68 points to pass and each skill demonstration is graded out of 5. My instructor Bruce insists on at least a 4 on each skill and will continue drilling you until you get 4. I ended up with 98 out of a possible 105 points it was hard work and tiring for myself, the other divemaster student and my instructor but it was also very rewarding.

There is also one more test which is called gear exchange. You and your buddy who you basically haven’t worked with before have to sit on the bottom of the pool and exchange your fins, weight belt, BCD and mask. That in itself takes some team work but here is the kicker you are doing this while buddy breathing. Which for non scuba divers is when you have one tank and one 2nd stage and you take two deep breaths of air and then pass the octopus to your partner to take two breaths. While you don’t have the octopus you must breath out. So basically you are task loaded in the extreme. I must admit it took us two goes. The first time we got all the way to the last article to exchange – the mask – before we decided between us we couldn’t hack it anymore. The second time we were smarter and did the mask first as it is the hardest I think. We also took more time the second time and kept a better rythm of handing off the air.

I did a few hours of boat work wednesday afternoon and was on the water match racing for a few hours in the evening. A good match racing practice with some lively discussion afterwards. It was blowing pretty hard up to 30 knots which is hard work in a J22 so we didn’t fly kites.