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GUE Fundamentals with Mario Arena
For a longer time we were thinking about making the first step in the DIR classes – the fundamentals.
After beeing convinced by Christian, a friend of us who did his fundamental class already in 2003, we decided to take this class this year. Together with Thomas Dederichs of BTS a class was fixed for end of July 2004. Instructor for the class should be Mario Arena from Triest, who showed a typical italian temper and got all students hooked.
Beside Klaus and me from Tirol were Mario from Italy, Thomas Gögel and Klaus Kisters from Germany and JanJaap Zeiger from the Netherlands to make this class a really international one.
The theoretical lessons were held by Mario in the classrooms of Tauch- & Reisewelt Mönchengladbach and lasted always longer than expected, due to the amount of questions that we had. So we got a lot of input, and if we had ever thought, that we knew enough about equipment and diving, we were brought back to the start. Mario helped us to make some minor corrections at our equipment to help us with our trim, and for easier access to the equipment.
The practical lessons were done at Groene Hoevels in the Netherlands. First we did always some dryruns with explanations from Mario, which were supported by his italian “body language”, that helped everyone to fully understand what he meant. The in water practices were captured by video to help us to see and understand our mistakes, and how to get better. We spent some hours in the water these days and had very good input and comments to improve our performance. It is amazing how much you can learn after some hundred dives about basic things like trim and buoyancy!
For us the fundamentals class were a very good first step into the GUE classes and we totally recommend everyone interested, to take this class as well.