ORANGE BEACH, Ala. — Craig Russell of the Baton Rouge Police Department likes to vacation on the Gulf in Orange Beach.

And when he can combine some training with the department’s dive team in coordination with the Orange Beach Fire and Rescue dive team, that’s makes it even better.

“Life is good,” a grinning Russell said. Both teams were training recently in an area just east of Sportsman Marina and south of the dog park on Terry Cove.

“Be careful coming down that hill,” Russell warned a visitor. “But if you fall, go ahead and roll all the way into the water because we already got divers out there to get you.”

Russell and the Baton Rouge team discovered during some of those vacation stays that Orange Beach has ideal waters for the training sessions.

“We did some yearly training down here for a number of years,” he said. “My family vacations down here in the summer in the area and we wound up calling the fire station a couple years back and asked them about airfields and support and some ideas.

“We had some jetskis at the time and they offered to do some basic training on the jetskis for us and they hooked me up with Chief (Kevin) Lanford there and we’ve been adding to it since then.”

The joint training has now become an annual event.

“This is our third year of coming down and working jointly with the Orange Beach Fire Department and in support of the Orange Beach interagency training and each year we’ve grown a little bit more,” Russell said. “This is starting out to be our best year yet.”

The crews have become so familiar with each other, there is a little competitive ribbing between them.

“We were in, found our object and they came in and did a search on their object,” Russell said. “Now we’re back even. We were hoping they wouldn’t find it.”

“The difference is we haven’t lost anything,” Lanford answered back.

More importantly, Russell said, the crews learn from each other and come away with more knowledge about diving.

“We’ve watched the technique of some of the drills that Orange Beach is doing which raised our curiosity and we’re trying that same technique with our equipment so that we can evaluate it and ask them questions,” he said. “‘Why do y’all do it this way?’ and my guys can tell me this is what we liked, this is what we didn’t like, tweak it, share information and make both departments better.”

The week began with some offshore diving just to review the basics, Russell said.

“For us this is kind of the best of both worlds because this environment is so great for training,” he said. “We were able to go off yesterday on a boat dive and all the divers got to dive to depth to make sure they are still performing tasks, functions, drills and they are comfortable at depth.”

On day two of training week, the crews were working in water that was a bit murkier on Terry Cove next to Sportsman.

“We were able to come into this which is semi-visibility and still see,” he said. “It allows if we’ve got a question of what’s somebody doing we can send another diver out to watch and it allows us to work on things.

On day three the crews went to the clear water of some springs near Ponce De Leon, Fla., followed a day later on the Intracoastal Waterway in water more like the Mississippi River back in Louisiana.

“We go to the springs and have real-life conditions with better visibility and then move over to The Wharf we really get into actual scenario type for us, water that’s not so clear,” Russell said. “The canal resembles the water we have back home and so there we get to take and clean up at the end of the week and practice any techniques there in more conditions like what we’re used to diving in.”

On Terry Cove, the crews simulated retrieval of evidence that might be tossed out and even some body recovery training.

“Earlier we looked for a hammer,” Russell said. “We threw a hammer out there as an object that might have been used in a crime or something. Right now, I don’t know if they recovered it, there was an old cordless drill out there.

“We’ve got a dive mannequin that we can put out there to simulate body recovery and just different things that might be common of things we would be asked to look for.”

Russell said eight of his nine-man team was able to make the training trip. Back home, they are called out for a variety of situations.

“We’ve probably been called out 10 times this year,” he said. “It varies. We were on standby for (Isaac) with our boats to go in and help people and once before we’ve rescued animals. People evacuated, didn’t think the water was going to get that high and we were on standby for animal control.

“Some of our boats can make it into relatively shallow water. And a lot of times in flood situations you have lots of changes in elevation.”