This was my first junior open water course I have ever taught and I did teach it to my 13 year old son Jonathan. Not only was it my son and my first junior open water but it was my first open water course after some 18 years of teaching advanced forms of diving such as technical cave, rebreather cave or Trimix diver courses.
I was surprisingly … well … I don’t want to say nervous … but I had my moments contemplating what I gonna do.
The first step was the obvious in consulting standards to see what needs to be done in terms of knowledge and skills, watermanship and training dives. Configuration came to mind early and I decided to deck Jonathan out the same way I dive single tank which is with ss backplate, wing and long hose … the Hogarthian setup. Some pieces of equipment needed to be purchased to suit his size such as booties and a shorty wet suit. My mom (Jonathan’s grandma) left some medium fins here years ago and they fit just fine. The other gear I had in my magic locker.
Then came the a phase of thinking what I would like to do and with it came the nitrox certification beyond the junior open water. As I had the drills and skills all lined up came the lectures and classrooms phase. To tell the least you have to pack the knowledge into small pieces as the attention span of a 13 year old is not that long. It has to be packed into a lot of diving stories too otherwise there is no interest to begin with.
We dug ourselves out of lectures and equipment configuration and jumped into the pool of pain otherwise known as Cenote Eden as it has such a large open water area. Surprisingly Jonathan came straight into the horizontal (guess the back plate and wing helped a lot) and picked up on propulsion and communication rather fast. The buoyancy thing took a little while but nothing to be worried about as we had 3 weeks to go.
As we finished our confined water sessions spread over two days each day Jonathan developed a strong liking to the jump off, some 20 feet cliff, where he performed excellent back and front flips. I joined him for some displacement water bombs. I started to like the course I have to admit. My nervousness slowly went away and I started to see how Jonathan got a grip on things, the ease of converting briefing and debriefing into positive dive action. Cool beans.
Our first training dives where conducted during hurricane Ernesto who hit land further south of us but got us rain and wind and with it bad viz in the ocean along with large waves. Happy us we had plenty of Cenotes to fall back to and dive. Jonathan really took a liking to the diving thing, liking the Cenotes with large open water areas and developed a good awareness. Communication got very good too. His smiles after dives where inspiring. This is what I remember about doing open water courses 18 years ago. I started to love it as I started to see these large smiles on Jonathans face after dives. Very cool.
As the hurricane went and the ocean cleared up we went for a couple of ocean dives in Akumal seeing a turtle, jack knife fish, lobster, lion fish and barracuda besides other stuff. That really lit up Jonathans face and he was so enthusiastic about the diving thing … And so was I. I can’t remember why I was a bit nervous at the start but am so happy that I taught Jonathan the junior open water diver and nitrox diver courses. I am so proud about the way Jonathan handled the training and the diver he turned out to be. We are two happy campers at the end of the courses and we happend to be father and son.