What it takes to be a PADI Divemaster

In order to qualify for the course you have to:

• Be a Rescue Diver
• Be an Advanced Open Water Diver
• Have at least 20 logged dives
• Be in good health
• Be at least 18 years old (that's in Poland, I'm not sure about other countries)
• Have CPR training, such as the Emergency First Response course

During the trainig, as we've learned yesterday, it takes a lot of reading:) All the books you've read so far and 3-4 more, all the PADI videos plus some more. Apart from that it takes good swimming skills, proficiency in basic diving skills, rescue skills, some instructor training, decompression theory.

You should be able to swim the following distances in given times (that's an average, you can be faster on one and slower on other):

Distance	Time
400m swim	< 11 min
floating on the surface	15 min
800m swim in ABC	< 18 min 30 sec
100m diver towing	< 4 min 20 sec

Basic diving skills include for example: mask removal and replacement, entering the water, breathing from a freeflowing regulator etc.

56m Dynamic With Fins - New Life Record

Today I've set my life record in Dynamic With Fins (DYN). This is a discipline of freediving in which you swim the longest distance you can on a single breath. It is one of disciplines recognized by AIDA - the international freediving association. There are also other disciplines, you can read about them on AIDAs site. Some of them don't appeal to me, the ones I consider fun are: DYN, DNF, CNF, CWT:

DYN

Dynamic With Fins - swimming the longest distance you can underwater on a single breath

DNF

Dynamic Without Fins - like DYN but no propulsion aids are allowed

CWT

Constant Weight - descent and ascent with fins only

CNF

Constant Weight Without Fins - descent and ascent without any aids

The world records (men) in these discipnes, sanctioned by AIDA, and my own pathetic records are (this is true as of 22.01.2008):

Discipline	World Record	My record
CWT	83m	5m(max pool depth)
CNF	112m	5m(max pool depth)
DYN	244m	56m
DNF	1865m	25m

Of course I also keep track of what's going on in the other ones, you can check current AIDA records here.


A picture of me going for the surface, taken last summer in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt
We train at our local pool and at Warsaw's deepest pool in The Palace of Culture (PKiN). Trainings in PKiN are supervised by instructors from our dive center, Nautica Warszawa, whereas at our local pool we have to rely on the lifeguards who also watch other swimmers. They tend to get very anxious each time we put on our fins and masks, they even require us to inform them if we plan to swim more than 25m (I already wrote why). This is a bit of a nuisance , but safety's first:).
As for the record - I plan to reach 75m in February.

Divemaster training starts...tomorrow

Tomorrow at 1900 we are starting our divemaster course. We'll get the books and other stuff... oh, I can't wait.
I haven't done anything connected with diving since the end of the nitrox course (apart from reading books and freediving training at the pool) and it's killing me. Magda is in the same condition... she even started talking something about going to Marsa Alam in february:) Unfortunately that's not doable:/ Anyway we're starting tomorrow :D

Book: The Last Dive

As I've mentioned earlier we recently came into possession of a book The Last Dive by Bernie Chowdhury. I, of course, read the book almost instantly as I thought it would be at least as good as Robert Kurson's Shadow Divers (both books touch the same topic). Unfortunately I was disappointed. You see, in Poland these books where published by two different publishers - a small one and a big one, The Last Dive by the former. It seems that the publisher did not have enough resources to get things done right. The translation is pathetic and so is the copy editing. Apart from the technical issues the book itself is badly written and chaotic. Nevertheless there's lot of interesting information contained in it.

The Last Dive is a history of a father's and son's (Chris and Chris Jr. Rouse) diving careers, from their first diving lessons to the tragic end. If you treat the book as a collection of anecdotes it might be readable. I wanted to read it because I've read Shadow Divers which was a very good book and wanted to see that story from another point of view.

The book is full of information on diving in the late 80s and early 90s especially about cave and wreck diving. It's also a great overview of the beginning of technical diving. The stories that constitute the book are, when treated separately, also quite interesting.

I would recommend this book, as you probably won't have problems with the translation :)

Swimming headaches:(

Recently I've been having headaches after swimming freestyle for longer distances or swimming underwater. I supposed this might be related to CO₂ buildup and today I've read an article on freediver training methods describing this. It also turned out (after a few visits to the local swimming pool) that the headaches started receding. That's probably due to my body recovering its CO₂ tolerance after the Christmas and New Year break laziness period:)