Julie's Boggle

This morning we awoke at 06:00 (wincingly early for a Saturday ) to drive up to Stoney Cove to attempt our last practical test in the BSAC Sport Diver qualification. We started with a dry run so Frank, our instructor, could spot all the bits we were bad at and give corrective guidance. This was important because Frank is a stickler and would certainly not pass us if he spotted any mistakes in the real exercise.

Then it was a half hour break from the water to have a traditional cup of hot chocolate and bacon “cob”. (That’s what the menu calls it, but it’s a really a rather tasty bacon bun. Apparently it’s Leicesterese. I note that www.dictionary.com doesn’t know this meaning for “cob” either, but it does offer “a mixture of clay and straw”. Fortunately the Stoney Cove cobs don’t live up to this definition.)

After the break we jumped back in for the actual test, which seemed to go well. Afterwards Frank, a veteran instructor who likes to keep people on their toes, was tight lipped about how we’d done. Not wanting to appear over confident, we refrained from asking and instead nonchalantly engaged in idle chitchat during the walk back to the car for dekitting, as you do. Since we were parked a small distance from Frank we were able to move on to open speculation as we dekitted; the verdict: we didn’t know but were worried – there had been one or two little glitches, would they been seen as show stoppers?

Once we were done, we found Frank who broached the sensitive subject by asking us how we thought we’d done. What a tricky question: you don’t want to admit to any mistakes he might not have spotted but you also don’t want him to have to take you down a peg. So best policy, mention one or two little things to show you’re aware of them and then await his judgement. Which came very soon: we’d passed .

So now we’re sport divers which primarily means that we can dive to 35m instead of 20m and with a greater flexibilty in choice of dive buddies. For one thing, this is good because it helps club dive planning. For another, we’ve been diving to almost 35m already but that is risky from an insurance perspective – now can do it with peace of mind.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 14th, 2006 at 7:53 pm and is filed under Diving, Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.