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This weekend was a little scary, really long, and really tiring.

But we made it. I—along with 3 friends—stepped into my scuba instructor exam with trepidation.

Let me describe my experience:

• Finished a Theory exam (five parts dealing in Physics, Physiology, Dive Planning, Environment, and Equipment) in 25 minutes. We were given 1.5 hours. I was the first one done. Passed.
• Finished a Standards exam in an hour. We had 1.5. Passed.
• Scored 25 on my skill circuit. That’s full marks across 5 skills. Passed.
• Did my confined water presentation (this is where we demonstrate and then have students do the skills in a pool). I was expecting each student to have a problem, but the examiner didn’t give problems to everyone. Freaked me out a little. Passed.
• Prescriptive teaching lesson (where we teach a presentation based on a question from an exam or knowledge review). I actually took some time thinking about my presentation, which tripped me up. My group had to wait for my turn (they were already done). Sorry, team. Passed.
• Open water presentation (no demos. Just the student proving that they can do the skill and me reinforcing proper conduct). Again, not everyone was given a problem. Passed.
• Rescue assessment. Examiner said it was one of the best he had seen in a long time. I think that means I passed.

All in all, I did really well. Surprisingly better than I thought. And my teammates (Tanya, Marla, and Colten) did really well too (we were all pretty even in the running. No-one showed up any other …which was nice, since that wasn’t the point of this).

To celebrate, I woke up at 7:30 AM, this morning (stupid internal clock), and promptly forced myself back to sleep until 11 AM. Probably a mistake and a good waste of a day, but after working so hard to get there, I needed a break.

Today at 7:12 PM (PST), I entered the water at Whiskey Cove with Tanya. We followed the slope to a depth of 79 feet (24 metres), swam along for a while and then slowly made our way back to the shallows.

The water was perfect with only a hint of rippling on the surface.

When we emerged 32 minutes later, we pulled our fins off and made our way back to the van. Not a single word was said (though that might have been more to do with fatigue than not wanting to spoil the moment).

We had just completed out one hundredth dive. It was an important milestone. We couldn’t enter the instructor exam next week without it.

It was also cool to finish this milestone where and with whom I started. Back in January, I was at 41 dives and creeping along at a nudibranch’s pace (a nudibranch is an underwater slug. Learn to dive already friends!). Tanya was looking for a dive buddy and asked me (actually, I distinctly recall the message going something like “Dave, we’re diving sunday”. Being that it came from nowhere, I could only reply with “Okay”).

After Tanya and I went diving, the dives just sort of piled on. Which is why I call it the start. Almost 2 years to get to 40… 10 months to get to 100. Thank you again, Tanya!

I should end the story there, but after the dives we raced back to Langley to do a snorkel swim assessment in the pool and now my knees are on fire. I really need to learn not to push my limits, but I get the next 4 days to rest before the instructor exam, so it should be okay.

I just failed a practice test for my Open Water Scuba Instructor course.

I failed my one point. Half way through the exam, my instructor told us to make corrections to the exam. I did. Some of them were to switch one answer for another—answer ‘a’ becomes answer ‘b’ and vise versa.

Most of those I got wrong simply by not taking a second look at which bubble I should be filling in. A stupid mistake that I can accept and fix for the real tests.

The one that burns my marshmellows though, is a question that I technically got right, but they made changes to the selectable answers. My answer didn’t match any of the available “possibilities”.

So I selected the closest one.

And got it wrong.

Upon review, it was found that the reason I got it wrong was because I was using a different method.

I used the method the exam requested.

And got it wrong.

If I get something wrong because I just plain shit the bed, fine… I can accept that. But don’t you dare tell me I was wrong because I should have been using a calculator instead of doing the math with pencil and paper.

… especially when it explicitly said to use pencil and paper.