Day 8: Hurricane Chantal!

Evaluating in the pool

Today we were due to head back to Corales for the last confined open water evaluations but with the foul weather and wind in the morning they’d decided to cancel. James told us it was a ‘CDTC learning moment’ about using conservative judgement! Instead we were going to use the pool at the resort. This was a very popular decision until we found out we would all be doing different skills. I’d had neutral buoyancy LPI (no worries) but now I had no mask swim which has a distance requirement so a little more complicated. I went to get my reel but as we were getting ready in the pool I overheard Johnny talking to one of my teammates about the CESA. Johnny said, why bother measuring out 9m, just get them to swim for 30s. He said they’ll be going at least 18m per minute so 30s easily covers the requirement. I went over and said, ‘well can I just do the same for no mask swim?’ which has a 15m distance requirement. He said ‘sure’, upon further discussion he said that may of the distance skills will have their performance requirements changed to times on the new course, so you heard it here first! It was a much simpler way to run the skill, so I just got them to swim around with me for a minute. I scored a 4.8 only dropping one point on the demo for not emphasising the use of the LPI for buoyancy before starting the skill. I matched up 5/5 for my evaluation.

Due to being in the pool we actually had a decent lunch break so I managed a quick powernap before we headed into another round of presentations.

The end of another hard day at work!

In the afternoon we had to deliver 2 more instructor level presentations, one from the IDC and one from the speciality instructor manual. It was a long afternoon and after the first set of presentations we were slammed for all taking too long. I took it upon myself to burn through the next presentation in a box ticking exercise. It paid off and I scored a 4.6 and a 4.8 respectively due to not using enough training aids and not interacting. I was pretty sure the scores should have been the other way around because I barely interacted with the class on the second one and used loads of training aids on the first one but there we go.

In the evening Dave, Jen and myself headed into the village and had some delicious chilli cheese fries followed by a vile burrito. It was cool to just chill and hang out with Dave as well, he’s rapidly become a really good mate and support on the course and I was also in awe at his ability to work a euphemism about backdoor sex into his contact and value on his presentation and get way with it. Likewise I’ve managed a perfect run on selling my double ender in all the presentations too! We couldn’t believe that the course was ending tomorrow either.