Dive HQ hit the Coromandel.
3 days diving in the glorious waters of the Coromandel. 1 instructor, 4 Divemasters/ instructors in training.
Deep dives, night dives, navigation dives, training dives.
After the long haul from Wellington we arrived in Whitianga late on Monday evening to a very welcome meal cooked by our early arriving diver, Raymond.
Tuesday was a busy day, with 4 dives in total. The first dive was a demonstration of how to run a deep dive. The rest of the dives were run by one of Lauren, David, Rachel or Raymond. Each dive was briefed and a skill was also described, briefed and while underwater, demoed and assessed.
Our first two dives each day were aboard the Scubadoo dive boat, ably skippered by Darrell, who with his crew and assistants really looked after us for the week. These dives gave the instructor candidates a chance to see how a larger dive boat operates and to hone their boat diving skills. We also had a chance to do a number of deeper dives, with the exciting narc test proving the incapacitating effects of pressurised nitrogen on the mental processes of the average (?) diver.
Other dives during the week covered such things as marine life interactions, night diving communication, compass use and boat entries and exits. This last led to the eternal question: Do you enter the water from the boat or the boat from the water? Any insights would be very welcome.
20m visibility was a bit of a shock to Wellington trained divers. After the novelty of being able to at all times see your entire buddy I think that we warmed to the idea. It was great to see how closely the students maintained their buddy groups. There is something to be said for learning in the gloom.
For me as an instructor having 4 freshly qualified divemasters around to organise the dives was quite an enjoyable experience. There were one or two occasions when it was a case of too many mad scientists and not enough hunchbacks. Then again everyone enjoys a bit of insanity.
Marine life wise there was so much to see that it kept us all occupied. Morays, demoiselles, bigeyes, snapper, porae, many different nudibranchs, eagle rays, crayfish, piper… I could go on all day. The marine life identification skills were particularly easy to manage, although on one dive while looking for 4 different vertebrates we hit a desert and saw only one solitary fish! Thank you Goatfish. The same dive site an hour later in the dark had a multitude of different species to be seen, you never can tell.
My personal highlights were being ‘attacked’ by curious piper on a night dive and seeing the student’s deep water descents improve on each day. I also have to mention the food, which was all prepared and cooked by the 4 Divemasters. It was the best food I’ve had on a dive trip, bar none.
It was a long week and hard work but very enjoyable and useful.
