Ohh how quickly we learn

Jeff had the busy day today, he was continuing his open water course with the 3 students. Their agenda was to start the morning off with open water dive 2. This dive would consist of a short session of required skills followed by a 45-50 minute dive. They went to Lighthouse reef which is a calm simple dive site, very well suited for new divers (this is where I went as well for some of the open water diver classes). Unfortuntely, the dive did not start off simple in anyway. The students were to descend down the anchor line to a depth of about 5 meters where they would have a short swim to a sandy patch for skills. The descent was a mess, some students going too slow while another was too fast. Jeff did everything he could to get them under control but this was no easy task. Kate ended up being one of the students to descend too fast and ran into an issue with her ears because she forgot to equalize. This ended up being a big enough issue for her to conclude the dive and return to the boat. That left only 2 students to manage. The skill session went rather well only a few minor snags which is to be expected. Then it was time for the dive, Oscar had slowed his pace quite a bit from yesterday which made him much more managable. He still had a bit of an issue of just swimming ahead and not paying attention to everyone else, but was obviously improving. Half way through the dive it was time to turn around and head back to the boat. Mack motioned for Jeff to lead the dive, he had never dove this site before but had payed attention to where they were in relation to the boat. Regardless, this can be a bit of a nerve racking task to navigate new students back to the boat at a site you have never been to before. Thankfully with Jeff's tuned navigation skills they made it back to the boat safe and sound. After lunch, it was time for open water dive 3 (or dive 2 in Kate's case since she is now a dive behind the rest). This was a similar routine in which they went down to a sandy patch performed a few skills then continued with a dive. This time Jeff was in charge of leading around the other 2 divers while Mack worked with Kate. The divers behaved rather well as Jeff toured them around showing them the corals and fish in the circle around the sand patch. After all 3 were done with their skills, they continued the dive. The students saw all kinds of new things on this dive that they were very excited about. This included an ornate ghost pipefish, several different clownfish, coral banded shrimp and Sam even found a Demon stinger fish, which are quite rare and well camouflaged. After the dive was over, they were all very excited to meet at the restaurant above the dive shop to look through the fish ID book and point at all of the cool things they had seen. This was a more rewarding open water dive for Jeff to help assist with. While Jeff was playing open water assistant, I had a practice run with my 20 skills. I was with Max and Molly who have excellent skills and are both about to start their instructor course. I was happy to have the extra practice. Some skills the three of us would complete simultaneously for the instructor to grade us all at the same time. I use the word simultaneously lightly since like I said Max and Molly are quite good at the skills and part of having great skills is slowing them down with good demonstration quality. I would be giving my signal that my skill was completed only to see from the corner of my eye that Max and Molly were only 1/3 to 1/2 way through their skill demo. I knew my speed would not be viewed positively. It was not because I was that good, but had missed a step or simply went too fast. After the skill set was over, we all got tips from the instructor. It was nice that Molly said she was impressed by how far my skills have already come and they will be tip top soon enough. This means a lot coming from Molly as she already looks and acts the part of a divemaster or instructor. She is always enthusiastic to dive and show others cool marine life. It is great to dive near her as she is always spotting creatures. Around 1700 most of the interns met with Mack in the dive shop to start our Thresher shark diver specialty course. This is a free course that they give to all of the DM interns if they want it. It basically is a course that teaches you about different types of sharks and how to tell what and how a shark eats based on its body shape and the shape of its teeth. We then learned more about shark finning and other threats to sharks existence. This class also included some specifics about the thresher shark. That was the end of day 1 of the specialty course. We all decided that we would do the first of our 2 shark dives for this course tomorrow morning. This meant 4:30 am at the dive shop for us. Knowing we would have an early morning we chose to go to the other place and get cheese burgers then call it a night. Big surprise they were out of cheese again, at least they still had burgers this time. So we each had an excellent burger then shared an order of fries and called it an early night.