Happy new year every Happy new year everyone!…
We started Dive phase this week. As a military requirement, since Sar Techs spend a lot of time in the water, we have to be qualified as CABA divers. (Compressed air breathing apparatus) it’s SCUBA diving… don’t know why the military insists on being different but it’s scuba diving.
Everyone had mixed feelings, driving down to Victoria Sunday morning, about starting dive the next day. We had no idea what to expect for day 1…
The start was quite calm… some administration stuff, everyone is coming back from holidays so a little disorganized. We got lockers, unloaded all our gear (we have A LOT of gear). I’ll try to attach a photo of the locker space. It’s ridiculous, and when you hear what we end up doing in the space it seems impossible.
Yes thats my ass… Then an instructor came in and said “akward PT gear”. An akward is changing as fast as you can. So this ment change as fast as you can into shorts and a t-shirt. The akward comes from an old Navy thing where people on ship have to change quickly. The name probably comes from how akward and funny everyone looks trying to put on neoprene suits that are crazy sticky to get into. They took us for a run to show us the 1.5mile route they use. After the run the instructor said “welcome to your first PT test”. We now had to race the 1.5mile run as fast as possible. After which we did max sit ups, pushups, pullups… “Akward Wet Suit!”… no way!, it was so cold, couldn’t use my hands very well and I knew the ocean was even colder.
We changed into our wetsuits as quick as possible, utter chaos! We had to set the dock up, raise flags the whole bit… as fast as possible. Our first time took 10min. Not too shabby… on Friday we did it in 3min 32 seconds.
After we got ready we jumped into the ocean and swam 1.5miles as a race… this is called the “morning swim”… I kinda look forward to it now, we want to get the akward under 3min. All of this was before lunch. Needless to say, it’s very easy to get a good night sleep.
There’s pt every morning, you have to run everywhere you go… no walking. Always moving, lifting etc. Very active course, should be interesting. I like moving around doing shit, makes the day go by a bit faster…
Tuesday/Wednesday we spent in a swimming pool learning about all the equipment and emergency procedures for scuba diving… spent the 2 days underwater. We practiced sharing air in the event you’re out. Practiced changing into different masks etc..
Thursday/Friday we did the same in the ocean, aswell as some searching underwater… you’re attached to a rope that’s being pulled on a certain amount of times to tell you what direction to swim (since you can’t see anything). The difficulty is we all barely knew what the different pulls ment. The blind was leading the blind… very basic stuff, walk before you run. It’ll get more difficult and complex. .. we’re all looking forward to it.
Amongst all this we did some lectures on how diving can kill you. And we had some discussions on the different animals/creatures we will encounter while diving. Some physics lessons on buoyancy (flims from the 1800’s), and some pt cock sessions.
Until Monday I’m going to rest up for the weekend, drink some coffee and see what next week holds. Scuba diving at night? Should be interesting.
RESCUE!
The SAR Take 
HI I am Jonny’s dad and he told me about your blog at Christmas I enjoyed reading it very much, I told Jonny when he got back from selection he should write some of his experiences down so some day his children can read it and when I no longer have a great memory I can also read it (daily) just got the update for last week, thanks for time in doing this,looking forward to next update.
Thanks Again Frank