Hey all,

Again its been a frantic week of stuff… hence the blog posting has been minnimal… sorry about that…

After 2 days of Permaculture… which was very tiring, digging trenches for water runoff in rock hard ground.. (I even managed to break the pickaxe!!)

Tired, and a bit crispy from all the sun… I was placed on another rescue course, and then immediately following that I was onto Open Waters again!

The Open Water course was not easy… Starting with 4 people, I did academics on the first day, and the next day it was into the pool… They were quite nervous, and halfway through the session, 1 of the students dropped a weight on to her big toe… Blood everywhere and a screaming student was not fun… She ended up going to the clinic, having her toenail taken off, and left yesterday without completing the course..

The 3 remaining students improved, but it was still hard… I had no time to eat during the course… managing to eat a banana on one day, and a sandwich 24 hours later… The next day, I didn’t eat again, and returning from the boat in a foul mood, I had a big rant about some staff issues I was not happy with… I then left the bar to go and finally get some food… Ordering a veggie calzone pizza to takeaway… it ended up coming with ham… and I lost my rag..  Walking out of the bar swearing and shouting at the staff was probably not my proudest moment… and I shall not be going back there in a while..

Open Water course finished yesterday, and straight on to Advanced today…. 5 more dives and maybe I’ll have a couple of days of to relax and shutdown for a bit…. but being Full Moon… I am not sure that’ll be the case.

I am glad to hear that my Mum’s knee operation went ok… I managed to call her yesterday at her hospital bed, and besides the obvious pain, she seemed in good spirits… Get well soon ma!!!

xx

SD

A full on week again, has limited me from posting on the blog. While Jen has been conducting Eco dives, I was asked to do another Rescue Course.

With 3 divers, and an MDST candidate (a new instructor learning the ropes) it was a tough course as I like things doing my way, but you have to give some control to the new instructor and allow them to make their mistakes. After completion, I was looking forward to 2 days out of the water at a Permaculture workshop.

Getting up this morning was hard, after a week of waking up a 3 – 4 am… I was quite blurry eyed as we headed to the Save Koh Tao office.

After a lecture about Permaculture, we had some lunch and proceeded to make a small garden patch using a technique called Sheet Mulching.

Using layers of cardboard, brown leaves, greenery etc, to make up different layers of Carbon and Nitrogen we built it up over a couple of hours before placing compost on top and planting a range of veggies.

Back again tomorrow for some more learning….

x

SD

Wow!! A day off for me…

So I laid in bed till 9:30am… bit of a record for me… lovely… I then laid on the couch all morning, watching TV and being a proper slob.

Then to make something productive from my day, I edited some footage (cos Tim came out filming to test a camera housing) of the “Hell Dive” from the Rescue Course… Its basically a part of the course where everyone goes for a fun dive but “problems” happen during the course of it… The ones I bring in would never truly happen in real life, but I believe if they can cope with the ridiculous stuff, then the rest comes easy..

Anyway, the video is called Hell Dive and is just a couple of minutes long…