This was a long one…
Last weekend was quite uneventful, lots of resting and relaxing. A few people headed back to Comox while the other half of us hung out in Victoria. Which ended up being much needed. It got to the point this week where everyone is kinda zombeeing around, we’re exhausted.
Every morning this week we ran, far. The morning runs have been around 10km each, plus remember that we have to run everywhere we go… And swimming? geeze. 2 days this week it seemed like all we did was swim haha. Every little thing that “went wrong” we were in the water and swimming. “To the dock and back!” (about 600m). Or 90 seconds of swimming 90 seconds of rest over and over and over… We’re doing pretty good, we missed a few timings this week and paid for it via swimming. Which let water into your dry suit, which made you cold…
This doesnt include the swimming involved in SCUBA diving. This week we did some underwater searching. The instructors would throw some tools and stuff in the water, we hop into the water, and a guy on the surface with a tether gives us rope signals to tell us where to go. Sound like a terrible way to communicate? It actually works quite well, assuming you can remember what each number of tugs on the rope means. It was pretty fun, i found a badass knife that i plan on keeping. Some people found some interesting things, one dude brought up what looked like a giant white board.
The days have been pretty cold aswell. constantly cold and wet. Seems to be impossible to take enough hot showers to warm back up, and the mess doesn’t make enough soup haha.
It all got interesting, however, at night.
Twice this week we dove at around 7pm, pitch dark, you literally can’t see your hand infront of your face. You get a glowstick to check how much air you have left and thats all. Down you go to 40feet below the surface and follow what they call a “Jackstay”. It’s a rope laying on the ocean floor in a giant square. You basically have to get over knowing that you’re swimming through darkness with sea lions and otters and you name it, and just swim until you’re out of air.
We also got some experience with underwater navigation. This was pretty cool, swimming with an underwater compass. The thing that sucked is you had to really swim. The currents are strong and the boat drops you off in the middle of nowhere. if you don’t swim hard enough, you wont move. It’s quite disorienting, sometimes you feel like you’re swimming in circles when in reality you’re swimming straight… and every now and then it’d feel like you’re swimming straight (meaning you were going in circles )
The remainder of the week was made up of classes and lectures on various aspects of diving (decompression, physics etc.)
But 2/5 weeks done, we all have about 10 hours underwater. We begin next week with another pt test and a full schedule of exploring the shallow green ocean of western Canada…
RESCUE!
The SAR Take 