PADI Rescue Diver Course – help other divers in emergency, a boost in your diving confidence
During this course you will learn how to handle emergencies during your dives like rescuing an unconscious diver from underwater all the way out of the water. Your awareness about potential hazards will be sharpen, so that you can realize minor equipment problems and other things, which could result in a big emergency underwater. The Rescue Diver course is without doubt the physical toughest course, but will boost your confidence as a diver tremendous after completition.
To start this course you need to be confident in your diving skills, otherwise it will be not very beneficial for you. If you cannot control your buoyancy and struggle with your essential diving skills, how could you handle other divers problems with confidence. So you should have a fair amount of 20 dives of experience and be advanced level certified. Sadly nowadays an advanced diving license is given to everyone so easily without really improving the diving skills from an open water level to an advanced level. Have a look at the PADI Advanced Open Water Course to get more information what I mean with that.
That is why we will do a check up dive on the first day of this course, to see at what level your skills are. If necessary we practice first your neutral buoyancy and weight you properly. Afterwards we go through all the rescue skills you need to perform in our confined water session like handling stressed divers and using different navigation techniques for finding missing divers. There are some nice places around Gorilla Chop in Motobu, where it is not crowded and no one disturbs in our exercise.
My wife will join us on the second day for playing the victim. The main goal of the rescue diver course is obviously becoming capable in rescue another diver in need. There you can show what you learned the day before and exercise the skills with an unconscious diver underwater and at the surface. This course will be physical tough, therefore breaks between the exercises are always welcome. Because we don’t go over the exercises just ones, but practice them a lot, the course will be stretched over 3 days.
The third day will be your final test. All the practice time is over and you are challenged with a diving scenario what we keep as real as possible. From finding a missing diver underwater, all the way to exit the water with this unconscious person. It will be stressful (promised), but after completion, it will feel so rewarding for you. Your gained a higher level of confidence as a diver.
A requirement for finishing this course is Primary and Secondary Care training within 24 months. So an Emergency First Responder training. Most of the rescue diver students have this already before beginning the course. That is the kind of training you need to do for getting your driving license. Here want to focus on the emergencies in the water, so the best thing is to have your EFR updated at your local facilities offering it.