‘Where’s the transect?’ Dan mimed to me. I shrugged back, ‘I thought you had it?’. We were lost. Clouds of silt surrounded us at the bottom of the Derwent River as we blindly searched the sea floor for our lifeline back to the buoy. We were supposed to be running a 100m transect on a bearing, and using that to establish our kick cycles and air consumption rates. Things weren’t going our way. Dan, Charlotte and I quickly turned around and headed in what we thought was the direction of the buoy, and luckily swam straight into it.

This ‘lost and found’ theme was maintained throughout my entire ADAS Scientific Diving Course, as I learned to perfect my underwater navigation, construction and team work skills under the thorough and patient instruction of Simon Talbot. The course has a large focus on developing skills that are directly applicable to real world scientific diving, with an intense focus on safety, and is run through the fantastic facilities of the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Science and the University of Tasmania.

Our fearless leader, Simon, saw all. There was no getting past him when it came to getting our basic skills strong. Especially when we were practising rescues. During the dives, the dive coordinator would nominate a safety diver, whose sole job was to be ready to get into the water at a moment’s notice to rescue Simons chosen victim. We would wait, cooking in our zipped up dry suits, for Simon’s shout of ‘There’s an emergency! Quick get in the water!’ If you looked too prepared, Simon might not call a rescue. I learnt the hard way however, that if you decide to eat a piece of cake while you wait, Simon would call a rescue. The staged rescue would then force you to abandon the delicious slice of cake you were consuming. You would then frantically try to find your gear to make it into the water in under a minute, accompanied with a lot of laughter from other members of the team. By keeping us on our toes, Simon quickly taught us to be prepared for anything, and by the end of week three, we were all experts at rescuing one another.

During the program, we were exposed to multiple new techniques and tools used for diving, my favourite being the full face mask. I had always dreamt of wearing a full face mask and fulfilling my dream of pretending to be one of the ‘James Bond Girls’. I loved the OTS Guardian full face mask instantly. Full face masks allow you to communicate underwater with other divers or people on the surface through speakers, keep your face dry and warm, and allow you to equalise by pushing a block against your nostrils and exhaling against it. This resulted in me having quite a large amount of mucus inside my mask as I learnt to equalise, which I then announced to the whole group over the speakers (much to everyone’s amusement).

We were also taken on a ‘dry dive’ during the course with the hyperbaric unit at the Royal Hobart Hospital. We all piled into the chamber dressed in the finest bright yellow scrubs the hospital has to offer. As we started our descent inside the chamber, we all started to sweat. The temperature rose dramatically, our voices got higher, and some of the girls got narcosis. On the way up a fog descended over us in the chamber as we cooled back down, and the giggling girls tried to remember what they had found so funny five minutes ago.

The course took a total of three weeks, and the theory involved was incredibly intense. I never thought I would be able to label and identify all the inner workings of a compressor, as well as valves, regulators and every other piece of dive gear I use. We took a total of five exams during our three weeks, and panic ensued throughout the class every time Simon announced that we would be doing a test. Everyone in the class passed the exams however due to Simon’s expert teaching, and the relief felt on the last day as we all signed off on our paperwork was tremendous.

The practical side of the course was equally as challenging, however I thoroughly enjoyed the tasks presented to us. One such challenge was to construct a square with a hypotenuse underwater using rope, steel stakes, and a sledgehammer. I was partnered with the mighty little Leah. Leah is even smaller in stature than myself, and I couldn’t help but laugh as the two of us awkwardly swam along the bottom carrying the incredibly heavy steel stakes and sledgehammer. We resorted to walking along the silty bottom with the stakes and sledgehammer under our arms, making us look like some sort of strange alien on an underwater adventure. Other challenges we faced included using underwater hand dredges. Once we had worked out the angle to hold the large dredge so that silt and mud wasn’t raining down on us, the real fun began. It was like vacuuming on a whole new level. If vacuuming my mums house was that fun I would do it every day. Hoover needs to take some notes from those underwater hand dredges.

I was exposed to so many new and exciting techniques and dive gear whilst I was in Hobart. I’ve fallen in love with diving all over again, and I can’t thank Simon, Joanna, Marty and Mike for their expert instruction during this course. I would like to thank Simon and his beautiful wife Jana, and their well-behaved dog Kiera, for sharing their home with me during my stay. I would also like to say a big thank you to Joanna for introducing me to what is possibly the best blue cheese I have ever had in my life and helping me with everything in general. My time in Hobart was incredible thanks to the epic team I had the privilege of working with, and I can safely say that Tasmania was another place that I was very sad to leave. I hope to pursue further levels of my ADAS training and develop my diving career in a direction I never thought I would take after being exposed to this course, as well as realising that I would like to do postgraduate study at the University of Tasmania.