By Marcus Aronsson, Södra Älvsborg Fire & Rescue Service, Sweden
Part 1 ended with me returning to the water after SIPE and learning one of the most important lessons of the course: physical capacity is not about being indestructible. It is about understanding your limits, respecting the load and being able to perform when it really matters.
Now the final weeks began.
THE FINAL WEEKS: DEPTH, DARKNESS AND EMERGENCY RESPONSE
For the final part of the course, we moved the entire operation from Lillsved to Kungsholmen Fire Station in central Stockholm.
The pace changed immediately.
The training now began to feel much more operational. We worked from the fire station, made our way down to the boats beneath Västerbron and headed out into the waters of Stockholm for the day’s exercises.
It felt less like school and more like the real thing.
Everything we had trained for now had to come together.
And the theory never disappeared into the background.
Quite the opposite.
During those final weeks, the studying intensified alongside deep dives, night dives and long days on the water. Everything was building towards a substantial theory examination covering diving medicine, diving physics, safety and regulations.
It was another reminder that rescue diving is not simply about physical ability.
It is equally about knowledge, discipline and the ability to make the right decisions under pressure.
The final weeks contained almost everything.
Forty-metre dives. Multilevel dives. Night dives. Emergency-response dives. Wrecks. Tunnel diving.
At the same time, the workload was beginning to make itself felt.
Many dives. Heavy equipment. Long days in cold water.
By Thursday evenings, I was often completely battered.
My body felt as though it had been run over.
It was during those weeks that I really began to understand that recovery is part of performance.
Sleep. Food. And sometimes having the discipline to do nothing between sessions.
Those things became essential if I was going to hold together all the way to the end.
40 METRES
The dives to 40 metres pushed everything to another level.
Nitrogen narcosis is difficult to explain to someone who has never experienced it.
You still function.
But not normally.
By the final weeks, the dives were deeper and the margins smaller. Staying calm and methodical mattered more than ever.
Your thoughts slow down. Your focus narrows. Your ability to deal with several things at once almost disappears.
During one dive, I lost control of my buoyancy after stirring up sediment from the bottom.
Suddenly I could see nothing.
I was trying to hold my position inside a cloud of brown silt while my thoughts seemed to move through syrup.
It was frustrating.
I am used to being in control.
But somewhere down there, I started to understand what the situation required from me.
I could not keep trying to think two or three steps ahead.
I could not deal with several things at once.
One task at a time.
Calmly.
Methodically.
That became the key.
The exercises continued to become more advanced.
At 40 metres, everything changed. The depth, the pressure and the effects of nitrogen narcosis demanded complete focus.
Multilevel dives required planning, discipline and constant awareness of depth, time and ascent profiles.
Night diving changed the entire experience underwater.
The narrow beam from the torch became your only reference point in complete blackness.
And then came the tunnel dive.
THE TUNNEL
If we had done that dive during the first week, I am not sure many of us would have completed it.
We swam deep into a dark tunnel beneath Stockholm.
Carp and discarded cans were almost the only things visible in the torchlight.
At the same time, you could hear underground trains thundering somewhere above or beside us, the sound travelling through the rock and the water.
It was a strange feeling.
That was when I brought out Marcus the firefighter again and pushed Marcus the person aside.
Focus on the task.
Not the feelings.
I was never afraid.
Just focused.
WHEN THE TRAINING STARTED TO FEEL REAL
The emergency-response dives became some of the most rewarding parts of the entire course.
Everything was starting to fall into place.
The search systems.
The communication.
The procedures.
The ability to remain calm under pressure.
By the final weeks, the training had become increasingly operational, with emergency-response dives that felt much closer to the real job.
During one emergency-response exercise at Norr Mälarstrand, I entered the water as Diver 1 to conduct a semicircular search for two people who had supposedly fallen into the water.
After several minutes in the darkness, I suddenly felt something in front of my hands.
The casualty dummy.
I had found it.
It was pure joy.
All the training, all the repetition and all those hours underwater had suddenly become real.
For the first time, I felt that I was genuinely starting to become a rescue diver.
But before we could finish, one major obstacle still remained.
The theory exam.
THE THEORY EXAM
We sat in a warm classroom as dive tables, calculators and rulers were handed out.
Then a thick bundle of papers landed on the desk in front of me.
The exam was so thick that, for a moment, I thought there had to be some mistake.
Then there was nothing to do but start.
Diving medicine.
Diving physics.
Safety.
Regulations.
There was only one way through it.
And in some ways, it felt surprisingly similar to diving.
No panic.
No emotion.
Just focus on the task in front of you.
One question at a time.
For me, it meant a resit.
But I passed.
Just like the rest of the class.
THE FINAL SWIM
Eventually, only the final swim remained.
The final assessment.
The last test before graduation.
We gathered early in the morning at Kungsholmen Fire Station.
There was something different in the air that morning.
Everyone knew this was the end of the journey we had made together.
We swam in groups, and there was definitely some pride involved.
I was part of the blue group, jokingly known as the “elite group”.
The pace was high from the start and it was obvious that everyone wanted to perform.
But for me, the final swim never became simply a competition.
It became something else.
The feeling reminded me of the Ironman races I had done before.
Find the right pace.
Do not go out too hard.
Work methodically.
Manage the effort properly.
I actually enjoyed most of the swim.
Moving forward with the group, completing the tasks and feeling that my body was still responding despite all those weeks of training.
By then, we had been through a great deal together.
Buoyancy exercises. Water-based physical training. Emergency drills. Deep dives. Night dives. Tunnel dives. Work dives. Emergency-response dives.
Stress.
Setbacks.
Fatigue.
But also laughter and friendship.
Somewhere during those weeks, we had become a team.
By the end of the course, we were no longer just separate training groups. We had become a team.
As we approached the end, we came out of the water at RĂĄlambshovsparken for the final 500-metre run back towards Kungsholmen Fire Station.
We still had the opportunity to race between the groups.
The pace was high, and it would have been easy to try to pull away from the others.
Instead, something happened that I think says a great deal about our class.
We made a decision together.
We would cross the finish line together.
Not as the blue, red and white groups.
As one class.
One team.
Together, we ran up in front of the appliance bay at Kungsholmen to the cheers of the station crew and our own classmates.
We hugged each other.
The instructors came over to congratulate us.
Then the course director, Roger, said the words we had all been waiting for.
“That was the final assessment. You have completed the course. You are now qualified rescue divers.”
That was when I broke.
The tears came.
At first, I tried to hold them back.
I could not.
It all came over me at once.
Around me stood the same people I had shared all of this with.
People who knew exactly what the training had demanded.
What we had invested.
What it had cost, physically and mentally.
And somewhere in that moment, I understood what had made the strongest impression on me.
Not only the training.
The people.
The sense of belonging.
And the feeling that we had made it through something difficult together.
NUMBER 700
Now it was time to celebrate.
The evening began at Katarina Fire Station, described in the course as the world’s oldest fire station still in continuous operation.
It was a fitting place to finish.
We were presented with our diplomas and the rescue diver qualification badge, the frog with the lightning bolt.
Each badge is individually numbered.
Mine was number 700.
Rescue diver qualification badge number 700. After 15 years of wanting to take the course, I had finally made it.
I put it around my neck immediately.
Not as a medal.
As proof.
Proof of the hours underwater.
Of mistakes that became lessons.
Of doubt that became respect for the task.
And of the fact that I never gave up.
It had taken me 15 years to get there.
But I was nowhere near finished.
This was where it began.
FINAL THOUGHTS
A couple of weeks later, after completing my local diving introduction back home, I looked back on the course.
It was not the individual dives I thought about most.
It was everything together.
The people.
The pressure.
The development.
The sense of belonging.
The aching muscles and the exhaustion.
I entered the course believing that rescue diving was primarily about technique and physical ability.
Now I understand that it is just as much about procedure, discipline and the ability to remain calm when the environment around you is trying to take that calm away.
It is also about trust.
Trust in the equipment.
Trust in the procedures.
Trust in your dive partner.
And trust in the team.
Because you do not do something like this alone.
What stays with me most strongly is perhaps not the 40-metre dives, the cold or the darkness.
It is the feeling that we went through something difficult together.
That we became a team.
The frog with the lightning bolt now hangs around my neck.
But the most important thing I took away from the course is something else.
Respect.
For the water.
For the task.
For the team.
And for how narrow the margins really are.
Because when visibility is zero and someone needs help down there in the darkness, trying is not enough.
My team and I have to be able to deliver.
Swiftly and safely.
CITA ET CERTA.
To the instructors, the trainee diving supervisors and my fellow students:
Thank you for making the course everything I had hoped it would be.
Harder than I expected.
More enjoyable than I imagined.
And far more developmental than I could ever have anticipated.
Thank you also to Södra Älvsborg Fire & Rescue Service for placing its trust in me.
And last, but absolutely not least, thank you to my family.
You carried me through this too.
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