Doing the count of May work, I realized I have a couple of stories to share, so here goes, let's see what interesting students I had in May.
Over the last few months, I generally had really good students. Easy ones, good in the water, nice to be around. So I couldn't help but thinking that karma was going to hit back at some point and that it was only fair that eventually I would get a challenging course.
The first one presented itself under the form of three fine gentlemen for the United States of America. California, to be precise. Within 24 hours, they were nicknamed Team Crazy.
They arrived on Friday night for the party, and because they landed too late to get on a speedboat they just chartered one. Fair enough. The next day I had the pleasure to start their course and get them in the pool...for the first time ever I felt like I needed my tank banger in the pool. These guys were obviously fairly intoxicated from the night before, but still functioning pretty good. All of them had the attention span of a 3 years old, which doesn't make it really easy in the water.
In random order: they were drawing boobs and cocks on their knowledge review while I was explaining the dive tables. When I am trying to get them to do a fin pivot in the ocean, one of them actually sits at the bottom on the sand and tries to build a castle. By the time they finished their exams, they were drunk and I had given up on them stopping drinking. One of them almost ran out of air on me...in 25 minutes. They tried on a dare to charter a helicopter to go to Gilis and back and were really pissed off not to succeed. They broke the fridge's door at the bar once it was shut down to get more beers. They drank their weight in alcohol pretty much every night. They asked several times if you could skydive with your gear on and drop straight down at the bottom of the ocean and I am pretty sure one of them was not joking.
As you can imagine, they were a lot of fun to be around...except when you tried to teach them diving.
The second bunch of not-so-easy students was not crazy, they were just sloooooowwww. So slow. One of them was also pretty bad underwater, the other two were OK, but all of them just generally needed a LOT of time to get through things. Once again I clenched my teeth and kept repeating to myself that patience is a mighty virtue.
We had a bit of a catastrophic dive with these ones. On the last day of their course, everything else is done and we have two dives to do. Currents can be pretty bad around here, but by the time we get to our first dive site everything looks quiet on the surface, slightly drifting as usual, so we get in. I get one of our minions Pete to buddy the not-so-good diver who has also trouble equalizing, and down we go. In the shallow waters everything is nice and quiet, but as soon as we start going down along the slope I can feel the current starting to push down mildly (which is never good, isn't it). So I signal two of them to come closer to the reef while poor Pete is in midwater with the last one. And suddenly WOOOOSH goes the current and down we go. They are trying to swim back at me and the reef with little success, because of course on dive 3 it is unlikely that you know how to use a pair of fins properly, while Pete holds onto the other guy as much as he can, way too far from the reef. It takes me about 10 seconds to decide I am not diving in this shitty mess and I signal everyone we are going up, but it still took us a good 5 minutes to manage to swim back up (or mainly, me holding onto the two of them and swimming back up as hard as I can while the current is pushing down, then going in circle as it turns into a swirling mess, my ears and my computer scream together as we go from 10 to 6 meters and then back to 9 and then up when I can fin, etc). Never been happier for my gigantic and powerful new fins as I am bringing up the weight of three people including a big guy. Out of the window goes the safety stop in a vortex of bubbles everywhere while my poor divers don't quite realize what is going on and I am bringing them up with all the strength I have. They told me afterwards that they thought they were doing something wrong while trying to adjust their buoyancy like good little students, which is why I grabbed onto them. Bless. Total dive time: 9 minutes.
That taught the minion a valuable lesson I suppose: when shit happens down there, go up, because the ocean always wins.
Pics below: skills on the second dive, crazy currents at the surface after dive 1, big fins that saved my day. Thanks Pete for the pics!
All in all, May was full of mantas, so full of joy. Still not bored of them, still amazed. In your next episode: the tale of my holidays in France!