Utila – Week 4, Day 2: High-Horse Rivalries
UTILA
Week 4
Day 2: High-Horse Rivalries
December 05, 2022
After an uncharacteristically slow week at Underwater Vision, I was finally assisting on a PADI Open Water course. Joining Andreas would be a guy from the States called Brett, along with Rachel (the instructor) and Corys – a new divemaster trainee from Israel.
Just as we started with the introduction, I felt someone tapping my shoulder. It was Michela – she had come for one final hug as she’d be heading to Nicaragua later that day. Seeing her all red and teary-eyed broke my heart. I nearly burst into tears myself, but, given that I was assisting with the course, I had to somehow keep it together. For some reason – despite not knowing her for that long – I was gutted. No more gossip and makeshift spa sessions with the fashionista I had grown to love. It felt exactly like a proper Grey’s Anatomy scene – the one where Cristina leaves Meredith in the taxi, looking back from the rear window with one final wave.
A New Nemesis Appears!
I had to get over my goodbye with Michela in a matter of seconds and jump back into the course.
We started off with equipment set-up. After Rachel demonstrated everything, Andreas impressed me with how quickly he picked things up. He nailed everything right off the bat and finished setting up in the blink of an eye without a single mistake. Brett, on the other hand, was very much like most students in that he needed a bit of guidance and had a couple of questions here and there.
As I stood near Andreas, I noticed Brett had forgotten to put on his weight belt before donning his BCD – a very common mistake we’d all make occasionally. I pointed it out to him, only for Corys to snap at me: “Do you mind? I’m helping him.” Taken aback, I just cast a side eye to Andreas and stood there – speechless and baffled. First of all, we never agreed that we each had our own student and the other was off-limits. Second, she’d just shown up out of the blue and was allowed to assist without even having started her skills sessions – purely because she only had just a couple of weeks to finish her course. The audacity!
During the session, she made sure everyone knew she had already logged 150 dives and that assisting on an Open Water course was gonna be child’s play. At that point, she was sitting on such a high horse that the only way for us to reach a lowlier position would have been to start the dive without her. What a pity that would have been, right?
After gearing up, we finally stepped down the dock stairs into the confined area where we’d be going over some of the basic skills. As always, Rachel made sure Corys and I were both within arm’s length of the students to keep them at the bottom and prevent them from floating up, while also being ready to assist if anything happened.
After a couple of surface skills – with me making sure no one drifted away as Corys floated around uselessly – we descended a couple of metres and began the basic skills. As expected, they struggled with buoyancy at first, with Brett resurfacing a few times. I followed Rachel’s advice and held him by the tank to stabilise him, much to Corys’s annoyance and my personal satisfaction (given that he was, apparently, her student). Andreas, on the other hand, barely had any trouble and flew through all his skills like a pro.
As boring as assisting on these courses gets – especially when you just have to lay there idly, freezing your ass off while the students do their thing – it’s also infinitely satisfying. I could still remember the first breath I had taken underwater back in Belize and how incredible it had felt. Now I was helping others experiencing the same thing. Much like I had unlocked another world when I started diving, now Andreas and Brett too would discover the underwater paradise that we had been oblivious to before then.
In fact, when we finally wrapped up the confined session and climbed back onto the dock, Andreas and Brett genuinely thanked us from the bottom of their hearts for helping make their first underwater experience so memorable.
They’d now have to tackle a few more knowledge reviews – which, thankfully, Corys the Iniquitous and I didn’t have to sit through. Instead, I joined the gang for a chill night at the dive shop. I have to admit, it felt weird without Michela jamming to RnB on the terrace – despite how much I hate the genre.
Stay wild,
Marius
Post-Scriptum
Amelia would be out of the water for at least 24 hours, having developed numbness in two fingers – a potential sign of decompression sickness (DCS). Luckily, she didn’t develop any more symptoms and it didn’t progress, meaning the chances of needing recompression were quite slim. I guess the worst part was that she earned the nickname “Tingly Fingers.” As if “Dirty Little Elf” wasn’t enough…