Can you really be Nomadic? My attempt traveling around the world...
Since getting back to the States, people have been asking me if I had any recommendations for Iceland. And I do! I love Iceland. It’s a small town city with lots to do. Within the city, you can ride your bike everywhere while feeling safe and secure. Outside the city, you can drive in any direction for 1-2 hours and have plenty of activities to do.
One item I invested in before I left my job was Global Entry. I was on the fence about it for a year. I wasn’t sure if it was worth my time and effort to spend $100. Global Entry is card that gets Americans a “front of the line” pass when coming from international flights and a “front of the line” pass going through security when flying domestically.
The application process is similar to a job security clearance screening. You will have to give information on your job, you previous addresses, income and other similar information. I had most of it already since I had to have it for my defense contracting job, so it wasn’t that inconvenient. If approved, the $100 fee is valid for 5 years. I was approved within a month and then kept checking the interview website for openings for a few days before I got my appointment. Within another week of the interview I got my shiny ID card.
Key:Blue area are countries within Schengen and Orange Areas are “to be added” countries. Grey Countries are not part of this treaty. (Map from Wikipedia)
This map would have been useful to me before I started traveling. Whoops. When I took a leave of absence, I flew to Finland, then Holland, then to Africa, then to Madrid, then to France before settling down to Iceland.
When I had planned my Iceland Divemaster program, I checked the Icelandic immigration website and found that I could stay in the country on Tourist Visa for 90 days. This worked for me because I was paying for the Divemaster program and I was not working. I didn’t need any special visa. Once I got to Iceland I met a lot of tourists. One couple in particular told me of their one year sabbatical and how it was hard to get around the Schengen area. Huh? That’s when I felt a deep lump forming in my belly. I went home and googled “Schengen.” Oh to my stupid American surprise that I found this map.
I channeled my old “worker bee self” and used powerpoint to do my divemaster mapping project. As promised, here is the final submittal I gave to Dive.Is to satisfy my divemaster training requirement.
If anyone sees any errors, please comment down below!
Wow. There are so many things that I want to say that I don’t know where to start.
First, the divemaster program was completely the opposite of what I expected. I imagined myself having tons of time for myself, doing yoga, discover iceland, everything except for Diving. (haha) Other PADI programs like advanced Open water, Deep Diver, and Rescue focus on your own development and improvement on diving.
The divemaster course is a big transition from being that vacationer diver to a full time diver that takes cares of others. Yes- you can still enjoy a dive and point out cute little crabs, but its not the main focus of the dive anymore. Instead, you are to focus on helping other divers, give them guidance, and if necessary, save their life. I guess I wasn’t prepared for that BIG transition.
During my three months in Iceland, I was able to dive for fun and dive for work. My fun dives brought back the relaxation and fun in diving. My work dives made me a better leader and stronger person.
Yay! I’m done! Well kinda… I finished all my internship hours yesterday. These three months in Iceland have really flown by. There were definitely days where I missed America, but there were many more days hat I was really happy to be learning something new and be in a new environment.
For the last week- it’s been a real rush to finish my program. On July 4th- a fellow DMT and I took our final exams. The exam consisted of 120 questions. At lest half of the questions were easy things that were was or watched in the DVD and Divemaster manual. About 20 of the questions- I really just guessed on. I had read the manual but didn’t memorize these little details. The good part is that after the exam we went over each wrong answer, so now I know what I didn’t know.For example, if a diver comes out of the water with bright red lips, what does that? Carbon Monoxide poisoning! ( I didn’t know that prior to the exam, but now I will never forget!)
Over the weekend we did our Divemaster workshops. The discover scuba pool session was pretty fun. Patrik was able to find a real student for us. (Thanks Deb!) We all then watched him conduct a DSD and then did our simulated sessions. This practice made it easy when we went to the open water. Continue reading
We planned to one person stay at depth of the “Big Crack”, another person holding the measuring tape, and then another person using the measuring tape. We would measure the width of the crack and then also use a buoy to mark every 20 meters. We practiced a couple times on how everything would play out in the water.
The water at Davidsgja was about 6-8 deg.C. A nice warm up from Silfra. The visibility was about 15 meters. I think the visibility at the bottom of the crack (approximately 160 meters from our starting point) was about 20-30 meters. Very Beautiful.
We had a couple of hiccups during the task. For one, the diveshop didn’t have a measuring tape, so we had created our own from a line and some electrical tape. This made measuring easy to spot the 1 meter tags, but difficult when trying to reel the line back in. Consequently, it took us longer to measure out 20 meter increments. We also had to split the task into two separate dives because of the length of the task.
