Austere conditions for training in Bere Island at the weekend
Last weekend saw a group of 7 divers travel to the beautiful scenic location of Bere Island in West Cork for a training weekend.
With weeks of relentless storms and swollen rivers due to the rainfall; an island always produces some shelter from strong winds on at least one side and even though strong winds of force 6 to 7 were again forecast last weekend; a number of the divers decided to travel regardless as dive skills need to be practised on a regular basis to keep them sharp.
Also when new divers start learning skills they need to log a series of dives in varying depths to be eligible to progress to more advanced levels and with most river depths being a maximum of approx 5 metres it would mean that if divers trained solely in a river environment then divers would never progress to new grades like diver two or three star or indeed as search and recovery divers; as you need diver two star to be eligible to become a search and recovery diver.
Over the course of the weekend most of the team would log four dives each and get in water times of over 2 hours; which is great considering the frigid temperatures and chilling winds over the weekend.
A big thanks to our equipments officers Olan O’Farrell and Eugene Whelan who did trojan maintenance on the boats in recent weeks to have them in excellent shape. One of the key ways that the search unit has always remained viable is that the units equipment officers do practically all maintenance on equipment (apart from specialist servicing which can only be completed by specialist vendors; so a big thanks to both. The other key way of keeping costs low is that all the search divers pay for their own equipment, medical and training expenses; which means that all dives carried out through the year are self financing and monies raised can be kept for core costs like insurance and equipment and clubhouse upgrades ; so weekends training like last weekend never cost anything and any funds donated are utilized only for core search unit costs.
A huge thanks to the people of Araglin for organizing a charity fashion show on the search units behalf on March 25th; all the proceeds will be utilized to help the unit with the replacement cost of the air compressor and is hugely appreciated.
The course for novice divers continued last week with ten new members and it was great to see such enthusiasm; in the coming weeks we will do a feature on all the new divers.