-The fastest car is a rental!

With those words Phil sent me and Maciej on our way after the CCR Diver course. The reason I was in such a hurry was that it was Friday afternoon and I needed to get a new medical for a commercial diving course. I had about two hours until my appointment and it was a two hour drive on a good day. Since this was Friday afternoon traffic was somewhat against us but after some heroic driving by Maciej we arrived with screeching tires just under fifteen minutes late and I threw myself and two bags of divegear into the clinic. Fortunately the doctor was a diver himself and helped me out even though I was close to fail on account of my bloodpressure.

The course demanding a fresh new medical exam was the HSE Scuba course, the first step on the ladder of commercial diving. I arrived at Andark (www.andark.co.uk) monday morning to begin this two week experience of another part of diving I had never tried before. We had a mixed group of divers wanting to work in diving. There were two guys who did the whole journey to become fully certified surface supplied divers wanting to work offshore and had only just started diving three weeks before and there were people with hundreds of dives working with media underwater. Our instructors were able to take this mixed group of divers and get us working together as a team and I dare say that everyone learned much every day. It was not so much a diving course as a course in organization and planning, everyone is supposed to know how to dive when you get there since the prerequisite is minimum rescue diver.

During the course your diving is assessed while you are exposed to a number of different environments and gear configurations. New to me was the use of full face masks and communication systems, even though it felt a bit bulky in the beginning I soon enough got used to it. What was all to easy to get used to was to have a dive tender who helped you to dress into all the gear and checked that you were comfortable. A habit I will have to kick fast.

During the course we worked with different communication systems and with line signals and in everything from ten meters visibility down to ten centimeters. The really nice thing is that as the diver you only had to do what you were told, nothing else. The hard thing was, you no longer were supposed to make your own decisions. If you are going to descend you do so because the supervisor told you to, same thing with going up. So after spending years trying to become a self sufficient diver capable of making my own decisions I was now tasked with doing exactly what someone else told me to.

The number one concern in all diving and maybe even more so in commercial diving is the safety of the diver. We spent a lot of time completing rescue scenarios and always had a standby diver ready to help out a diver in trouble. Here I think we really learned a good lesson when seeing what a good surface organization can do in a rescue situation. With some training we trimmed the time from emergency call from the supervisor to having a standby diver in the water descending down to under a minute. Finding the diver was never a issue since they were attached to the other end of a rope, making rescues very efficient.

We all had a good time on the course and I think everyone learned something they will make good use of in their future diving. I’d like to thank the guys at Andark for opening this new world of diving for me and for making a serious course so much fun.