First fall class.
I had my first fall class this weekend and it was a little different. Saturday I had eight students plus one refresher. The difference was it was all adult men.
Four of them where college and five were men in their late twenties to late sixties.
I haven’t really had all men very often. I’m used to young to middle aged couples with several kids in class.
They made it through the Saturday portion including the 2 hour nitrox part at the end. We started at 8 a.m. and finished around 5:30 p.m. None of them fell asleep during class but like most men I had to have stretching breaks so they wouldn’t zone out on me.
Next we moved to Sunday for the pool portion of the training. We met at 9 a.m. at the pool and unloaded the gear and tanks. Then it was time for the swim test portion of the class. You have to show that you can swim at a bare minimum in order to do the pool and open water portion of the training.
You have to be able to swim 50 feet holding your breath underwater. It sounds easy enough but most people can barely make it to the 50 foot mark on one breath. I know I have certified thousands of divers over the years to know this.
As an instructor I had to swim 75 feet underwater on one breath, it took me three tries before I made it. *Disclaimer here* For all you TRAINED breath old divers I’m not talking about y’all, just the average individual.
The next part is to swim 250 yards without stopping or 10 laps in a 25 yard long pool any stroke. Unless you swim a lot of laps daily in a pool it is way more difficult than you might imagine – especially if you’re older, out of shape, or you smoke.
The next part is treading water for a total of 10 minutes with the last 2 minutes with your hands out of the water. For those of you who can float this is a very easy part but for some of us who sink like a rock (yours truly) it can be very difficult and demanding.
After that we started the pool portion of the class. I forgot to mention that the pool I use for the class normally is heated to about 85 degrees year round but for some reason it was about 68-70 degrees. The outside air temperature was 50 degrees and so the pool kind of felt warm.
We stayed in the pool for about 5-6 hours and had to call it quits for the day because we were all shivering so bad it hurt. We will finish the surface skills in the springs on our first open water dive with wetsuits on.
-Russell Miller #59999