Dive Instructing Has Its Rewards

I have just spent June in Manado, North Sulawesi, Indonesia, running an Instructor training course, Dive Con course, Advanced Open Water course and an Open Water Course for trainee dive guides.

This work load had some interesting challenges apart from the number of hours in a day and my poor attempt at Indonesian.

One of the girls who wanted a job as a trainee dive guide had never been in the water before. She was friends of one of last years trainees and really wanted to be a dive guide. As part of the 8 day, 14 hours a day, Open Water course we needed to overcome here fear of the water and teach her to swim. By the end of the course she was able to pass the swim test (200m swim and 10 min tread water) as well as snorkel for 1km, perform skills that would put most of us to shame including swapping all equipment will her buddy, and pass the theory exam in English. This was quite a satisfying result.

All the trainees from last year as well as this year were from Tondano, a lake side village about 3 hours drive from Manado in the hills. They were keen to take us for a dive in the lake. Very few people had dived there before and information was hard to get. The lake was meant to be at 600m altitude, 20 meters deep, poor visibility and is silting up at a rate of 20cm per year. There is an old village in the lake we wanted to find, although I was not sure how much of a village largely made from bamboo and submerged for 100 years would be left.
 

We made plans for a low vis altitude dive and loaded the gear for 20 divers,  35 tanks, the 20 divers and a few extras into 2 standard single cab utes for the 3 hour drive. We had to have several stops along the way as the exhaust fumes were making people sick. On arriving at the lake we had lunch at one of the trainees houses and then proceeded to load the gear into  a boat slightly larger than my surf ski and about as stable, for the 10 minute trip to the island in the middle of the lake. The water was black with only about 1 m of vis which reduced dramatically if you touched the bottom. We didn’t find the village but there were lots of fish, large mussels lots of fishing nets and large sponges. Everybody performed the dive well before we climbed back into the "boat" and went back to shore. We then proceeded to have afternoon tea at about 5 different houses before the 3 hour drive in the back of the ute with all the gear.
 
This was certainly an interesting experience.