Long time no see!  For those of you who have followed this cadet thread you may remember that I blogged last December during Army-Navy week.  I really enjoyed sharing that week with everyone on armystrongstories.com and am very excited to do it once again with everyone as I prepare for my last Spring Break as a cadet.

I am a certified SCUBA instructor through the USMA SCUBA team, which I have been a member of since my Plebe (Freshman) year.  I am also the CIC (Cadet-in-Charge) of the Spring Break trip this year and after discussing with my teammates decided to undertake the most ambitious trip the team has ever done.  We decided to go to Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt this year in the bottom tip of the Sinai Peninsula.  For those of you unfamiliary with Egyptian geography, you can find Sharm el-Sheikh on the bottom tip of the Sinai peninsula on the map below Southeast of Cairo.

 We depart tomorrow at 14:30 for JFK airport in NYC and then take off on a 12-hour flight at 18:30 to Cairo and then a short layover to Sharm.  There are 15 team members, 1 officer and his wife, 1 Sergeant First Class and his wife, and 21 non-team member cadets and civilian girlfriends going.  It's going to be an amazing time and everyone's been really excited for it as it draws closer to Spring Break.

For the past two Tuesdays we've held refresher pool sessions for everyone to refamiliarize themselves with SCUBA diving skills before we depart.  Below is a video of SFC Miller's wife, Sheryle Miller, practicing the "trace" method to recover a lost regulator while team member Cadet Joe Sattler, '12, supervises.

Here is another video from the pool session.  This one CDT Chrissy Rath, '11, and her boyfriend CDT James Whitler, '11, practice "buddy breathing," which is executed when one diver runs out of air.