Our Internship... Start to Finish

Katie and I landed in Liberia, Costa Rica on the evening of Thursday, Februard 23rd.  We were picked up by our divemaster instructor, Scott, who turns out to be one of the nicest people on the planet.  He calls himself "the mean guy" and he's a terrible liar.  Katie and I were secretly hoping for a few days off to settle into the area, but we figured that if the shop had other plans we would go along with whatever they had in mind.  Well at around 5am on the morning of Friday, February 24th, Katie and I were up and getting ready for our first day of work...

We arrived at the shop and were greeted by the shop owner, Mike, and a few other staff members who quickly put us to work.  There was no diving planned for us that day, but we did still need to help prepare for the day of diving for the customers.  I'll get more into what that work entails a little later, but for now I'll just say that we were pretty sweaty by the time the boats went out for their dives.  Once the boats went out, Katie and I got started on our training with our Emergency First Responder course.  We spent most of the day doing that, followed by some more labor when the boats came in after finishing their dives.

At this point, the apartment that Katie and I had lined up wasn't quite ready yet, so we were staying with Scott who lives in a beautiful house on the side of a mountain overlooking the ocean (pictured below).  It was a really nice place to stay, but didn't give us a chance to unpack and settle into our own place.

The pretty sick view from Scott's house

Day 2 was similar to day 1.  We helped prep the boats, but this time Katie went out with one of the boats to assist with snorkelers, while I stayed back to assist with an open water scuba dive class that was doing pool work.  We helped unload the boats when they came back and then headed back to Scott's place for some more of our own scuba training in the evening.  Our apartment still wasn't ready, so we still weren't able to fully settle in.

On day 3 we finally got to move into our studio apartment at the end of our work day.  The complex we are living in turns out to be really nice, but unfortunately the cleanliness of the apartment when we moved in wasn't exactly what we were hoping for.  The floors needed to be swept and mopped, all of the dishes / silverware / and counters needed cleaning, and there were lots of bugs.  We also had no food and the closest grocery store was a 10-minute walk away.  Given our level of exhaustion after a day of work, there was no way we could tackle all of this in one day, so we tackled each of these issues over the course of the next week.

The next week or so followed a similar daily routine, so I'll outline it here.  Wake up at ~5:00am -> make some breakfast / sunscreen / get ready to go in -> ride with Scott or walk 1.5 miles to the shop -> load customer gear bags into truck to bring to boat -> load gear bags & full scuba tanks into boat -> set up gear and prepare weight belts for customers while we head to first dive site -> complete dive #1 in chilly (~70F) water with poor visibility (~10-30ft) -> head to second dive site while switching gear to unused tanks -> complete dive #2 in chilly water with poor visibility -> disassemble gear while returning to shop -> load empty tanks and gear bags into truck -> unload used tanks at compressor station -> unload & rinse / clean all used gear at the cleaning station and load back into truck -> load unused tanks into truck for next day's use -> unload & hang clean gear in gear locker to dry for next day's use.  This process typically took us until ~2-4:00pm at which point we would either hitch a ride or walk back to our apartment.

Given how tiring this daily routine was, it took us a lot longer than we expected to settle into the apartment.  After a week of doing the little we could every day, we finally got to a point where our stuff was unpacked, we had food, and the room was clean.  We also had extremely sore muscles and a lot of sunburns.  We finally asked for our first day off one week after we arrived, and were thankfully granted it.  This gave us a chance to finally put the finishing touches on settling in.

By this point in the internship, Katie and I were starting to second guess our decision to come here.  The workload was brutal and the diving conditions were not what we expected they would be.  On top of that we were starting to wonder why our training hadn't progressed much past the training we received on our first two days.  We fully expected this to be a working internship, but we thought that meant that our time would be split between helping out in the shop and working on our divemaster training.  Up until this point, we had received very little training and had been worked to the bone at the shop.

The day we returned after our day off I was approached by the owner and "encouraged" to not take any more days off for the remainder of my time here.  He pointed out that I was 80 dives away from the minimum I needed to be an instructor, so If I wanted to reach the instructor rating I would need to dive every chance I got.  So that night I went home and did a little math.  At ~2 dives a day, it would take me 5 weeks and 5 days to complete my 80 dives if I took no days off.  If I were to take one day off per week, it would take me 6 weeks and 4 days.  So taking no days off would save me a whopping 6 days in my quest to get 80 more dives.  This did not seem worth it to me, and I was a little concerned by the suggestion that wanting one day off per week was seen as a negative.

After a couple more days with this routine, Katie and I decided it was time to talk to our schedule coordinator about their expectations for our time there.  Our understanding before we arrived in Costa Rica was that we would work 8 hour days, 6 days a week, and that our 8 hours would include shop work as well as training.  We expected to do book work / homework outside of this time.  After our conversation with management, we found out that the actual expectations were that we work 8 hour days, 6 days a week, with additional training to be completed after shop hours for an additional ~2 hours a day.

So now we had a lot of factors working against us that were forcing us to reconsider our decision to come here.  While the labor was backbreaking, Katie and I were happy with how our bodies were adjusting.  Our sunburns were turning to tans, and we weren't as sore every night as we were the night before.  On the down side, however, the diving conditions were not fun and we were frequently looking forward to short dives, the work expectations changed when we arrived, and the apartment was a 15 minute walk to town which made it difficult to have a strong social scene, especially with how tired we were at the end of the day.  The one thing we had going for us was the crew we were working with.  We absolutely loved loved loved the crew.

If any one of these issues were present by itself, I'm sure Katie and I could have gritted our teeth and gotten through it.  Unfortunately, the combination of all of these negative factors brought us to the tough decision to drop out of the divemaster internship at this shop.  We both expected the internship to be a difficult but enjoyable experience, and that was not going to happen if we stayed here.  In speaking with the other members of the crew, they encouraged us to pull the trigger and to try again in a more fun location with better diving conditions.

So at this point we are back to square one.  We still plan to complete our divemaster certifications before the summer, but now we need to regroup and decide on a new shop in a new location.  For the time being, we are already in Costa Rica and we don't plan on wasting that opportunity.  We plan on taking a month to travel around the area and enjoy everything this region has to offer.  We still have an apartment in Coco so this will be our home base.  On Saturday March-11 we headed to Nicaragua to spend a week there.  After that we plan to return to our home base in Coco for a few days before we head south to explore more of Costa Rica.  We will probably leave the country around the end of the first week of April, where we will either head home for a little while or head to our next destination.  Either way, we are super excited for what the next few months have in store, and we know it's going to be a hell of a ride :-)

Even though we only got two weeks to know them, I'm seriously going to miss these guys when we leave