A Busy Day at Pearl Lake

Yesterday we had a busy day at Pearl Lake, teaching three Open Water students, two Peak Performance Buoyancy students, and one Rescue Diver. The rescue course, the last step before professional diving courses, is particularly fun to teach. Through the course study and the skill development, the instructor gets to see the student’s transformation from an independent minded diver to one who cares for others at a high level. The other aspect of the course is that we enlist the help of other divers to serve as victims, our preferred choice being successful former Rescue Diver students.

As our rescue student, Sarah Barrett, was communing from Indiana to take our course, and under a time crunch, we made a special class for her. In the pool, we were lucky to have Manta Diver Kathryn Elliott, who just happens to also be a lifeguard trainer, act as victim for skill development. She challenged Sarah to deal with simple rescue of tired divers, to full on irrational panicked divers, to finding and surfacing with an unconscious diver, as Mike coached Sarah through the exercises. Kathryn was a huge help and it showed in Sarah’s performance in the open water.

After skill development, Rescue Diver students must apply what they have learned in the open water through a number of scenarios. For this portion, we enlisted the help of Sheryl and Jerry Brandes, who took the rescue course last summer. As recent graduates of the course, they bring a special talent for playing the victim and their input during debriefing provides a unique perspective. In addition, as with everything we do, we want everyone to be safe, so having a number of rescue divers on site is always a plus.

At the end of the day, not only do we thank everyone who helped in getting Sarah through the course, but we hope everyone, including the newly certified divers, learned something or took something away from the exercises, be it a skill, or inspiration to work toward becoming a rescue diver themselves.