Having done my Medic First Aid the previous Saturday, it was back to the Lakeside centre for a classroom session on the Friday, followed by a further session the following morning. We arrived at Dosthill at about 1:30 pm on the Saturday to do some of the drills in the water.

There were 9 of us on the course, myself, John, Neil (2 guys who were changing over from SAA), Clare, Ian, Matt, Les, Kevin and Richard.

We ran a little behind schedule and we only completed the first 4 slates this afternoon, this meant extra work for the Sunday.

After sampling the local lager on Saturday I was really looking forward to getting in the water on Sunday morning???? We quickly found out that Les had not arrived, …….“and then there were 8”

Spent lots of time in the semi tropical Dosthill water today, including one spell of approx 70 minutes. Dry suit or not, it was bloody cold.

And so onto the final scenario.

A diver approached the marquee where we were gathered and said “anyone seen my buddy, I can’t find him”, to which several people replied “no mate he is not in here”….oops we were not ready.

So the magnificent 8 sprang into action. It was already agreed that I would be the surface co-ordinator, John and Neil would go out as skin divers, Ian and Matt would conduct the underwater search and when the casualty was raised hand over to the surface divers. Clare would look after the oxygen and first aid kit, Richard would contact the EMS, and Kevin would handle the first aid when the patient arrived on shore.

It all went quite well (well except for a few oversights, which I will mention later). The alarm was raised at 1:42 pm, divers were in the water by 1:44 pm, the patient was loaded into the ambulance by 1:58 pm. That’s 16 minutes in total, so not too bad.

So what went wrong.

After interviewing the buddy, we took our eyes off him and he went back into the water.

Guessing that someone would try to make off with the first aid kit we kept our eyes on it right until we were giving CPR at the end. Then it went!!!

We even remembered that we had to keep the divers kit for later inspection. That was until one of the instructors offered to take it to the office for safe keeping. Yep we fell for it, …..thanks Andy.

All in all a good time was had by all, I think we all learned quite a lot. Hopefully it has made us into better divers.