This week in Lembongan… Our instructors have been busy teaching new students about the wonderful world of diving. We have had Rowan jumping between teaching an Open Water course with the help of Yayan, to teaching discover scuba divers. Bryce and Fred have been out panicking and screaming for help while teaching a rescue course. Yayan has popped over to Bali to teach another person Open Water course and Fred has just started a deep specialty course.
The water movement, sea creatures and conditions, make for an interesting place to learn diving or advance your skills and knowledge here in Lembongan. For learning, new divers get the chance to experience more realistic conditions. They have the chance to learn about tidal movements, waves and current, which helps build them into better, more controlled divers. They are also more prepared to dive in more locations. This is compared to doing the course where you have, pool like conditions on all open water dives, yes it does make things nice and easy but what happens if the next locations the student dives in, does not have conditions like that. Even though Lembongan is know for having strong currents, we do control the situation by choosing sites that are safe and comfortable for learning and we would never teach a course in extreme conditions. Diving is meant to be fun! You also have the chance to see manta rays and turtles during your course dives.
This idea is the same for when teaching the rescue course, again you can learn in a place where, while you are doing your skills, there is no environmental factors that you need to deal with on top of the skills you are doing but to us, this seems a bit unrealistic. In order to be sure that the skills and knowledge are stuck in the students mind when they finish the course, we try and make things as realistic as possible. So the student will need to preform the skills in some sort of current or work their way through some waves to get the injured diver back to the boat. It is these environmental factors that could cause a diver to panic, so the rescuer needs to be comfortable working with theses conditions. To make things a little bit easier for the student, we do work through all the steps in the swimming pool first to get the student comfortable with the skills and knowledge before putting them into realistic situations.
All in all, our students had lots of fun learning new things about diving this week and our instructors had lots of fun teaching!
