Nov
22

Teaching this week.. and it drops to 26ºC in the water

Filed Under (Day to Day Stuff, Dive Log) by divebunnie on 22-11-2009 and tagged , , , ,

DiveBunnie
After a week of guiding I was back in the shallows for an Open Water Referral course.
Now these can always be a bit of a shot in the dark. Basically, this is where the student has already completed part of their course (usually the classroom and pool sessions) with another instructor, and has come out somewhere warm and sunny to complete the rest of it. Usually all is fine and it is just a case of assessing your student, and off you go for the four open water dives over the course of a couple of days. However occasionally you get a situation where the student is a bit rusty or has forgotten some of the skills. Very occasionally you might get someone who says “Oh I didn’t do that skill” which is always a bit of a worry. However today was one of the good ones… it happens that I also know his instructor, so that certainly helps.
Within the first ten minutes of his first dive, we had seen the resident eagle ray off the beach and throughout his course, we saw some great stuff. Obviously a lucky diver… we saw barracuda on both dives off the boat and again giant barracuda in Jackfish Alley when he went on to complete his advanced course a couple of days later.
I must say the water temperature is dropping :( yes it is that time of year, and I have already been in my wetsuit a month longer than last year. So let’s see if I survive another week and last until December… me thinks not. To be honest, I did intend to wear the dry suit on my last dive on Friday and had remembered to bring everything with me… bar the inflator hose!! Doh!! So rather than bear with a leaky squeezy suit, I went wet again and just shivered my way through the dive.
I will say that the merino lining in my hooded vest really does do the trick tho. I had tried adding another layer (a well known brand of fleecie lined rash vest) underneath for one dive, and froze as a result!
So for the record.. it is 26ºC in the water (27º off the beach) and not really a lot warmer in the air (that is what the issue is here, how cold you feel when you get out of the water brrrr).

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