After Mission Beach, my next stop was to be Magnetic Island where I would catch-up with the guys for a couple of nights, then stay behind to complete the SSI Open-Water Diving course. It was a very simple plan, but it became a little more complicated when it emerged that the dive medical required to start the course would not be performed on the island (as I was led to believe), and that I now had a day and a half to find a doctor, make an appointment and get myself declared fit-to-dive. This meant stopping along the way in Townsville.
I’d been told that there weren’t many reasons to stop in Townsville unless visiting relatives or conducting urgent medical business. As far as I could see, it has a small ferry terminal, an RAAF base, a few (mostly empty) pubs and thankfully, a couple of doctor’s clinics! When I checked into my hostel I made a point of asking if there were many places in the town were I could get my dive medical. After being assured that it was a very common request around these parts, and that all the clinics accept walk-in patients, I went to sleep feeling a lot more relaxed. I soon found out that these were all lies! Except the part about dive medicals being a very common request. So common in-fact that the next appointment one clinic could give me was in 6 days away! Eventually, and after a little bit of exaggeration, I was given a cancelled slot for the next afternoon. The medical itself was a lot more thorough than I had been expecting, but after an hour of being poked and interrogated, I was given a sheet of paper saying I was allowed to go diving.
I arrived on Magnetic Island that evening, and started the course early the next morning. As I slowly woke-up, it dawned on me that the other five people on the course were German, and that all but one of the instructors spoke German as a first-language. The course started with a lot of theoretical work. We were given a manual and told that we had to complete a multiple-choice exam before we were allowed into the ocean. This was a lot like the driving theory test, but with questions relating to Boyle’s Law, hydrostatic testing and partial pressures of nitrogen. This occasionally led to problems with translation. All the teaching materials were in English, leading to frequent breaks to rephrase more technical information in German. For example, apparently, there is no direct German translation for the word “Condemned”. Over the first couple of days, we only spent around an hour and a half in the pool doing practical skills. On the morning of the third day, we set-up all of our equipment, squeezed into black neoprene suits and staggered down the beach to the warm water of Nelly Bay.
These first two open-water dives were mostly spent performing the tasks that we had learned in the pool. These were things like clearing water from a mask, retrieving a lost 2nd-stage air regulator, and removing and replacing the buoyancy compensator jacket. The visability was around 8 metres on the first couple of dives. Not spectacular, but easily far enough to see things clearly. At one point, while kneeling on the sea-bed, an 18-inch stingray came along and sat next to me in the sand for a few minutes, before darting off into the coral, presumably looking for something more interesting. Our second day of open-water diving was much longer. Two dives in the morning, followed by another two in the afternoon. The morning session was mostly spent on more skills, but in the afternoon session we were free (as a group) to swim over the coral formations that are dotted around the bay. The visibility had decreased again, but we were still able to spot plenty of stingrays and even a small shark amongst the reef!
I really enjoyed the diving, but the early starts and breathing so much dry, compressed-air tired me out to the point that I didn’t really get to see any of the island itself. I’d like to come back here sometime in the next few months and take a few days to wander around a bit, and maybe do the Advanced Open-Water course, but now I’m off down the coast again to Airlie Beach where I’m going to jump onto a boat and sail around the Whitsunday Islands for a few days!
