DIR Diving Blog

Well certainly was an interesting weekend. Great to meet some of the YD’ers who’s posts I’ve been reading over the last few months. Despite previous reports, I was still surprised by how difficult the course was.

For those who don’t know the format it starts at 7pm on friday night with lectures and powerpoint. On Friday night we also ended up lying on top of tables practising fin kicks. After half hour of that my legs and ankles were aching (much worse now after the 4 dives). Saturday ran 9am-8pm including 2 dives and more work in the classroom. Sunday was 9am-7pm including 2 dives, swim test at the local pool and some more lectures.

A pointer for anyone in the future – do NOT choose to try twin’s for the first time on Fundy’s. I discussed it with one of the instructors and in retrospect he admits it was bad advice to give it a go! Couple of the other guys on the course who often use twin’s actually swapped back to singles because they didn’t want the extra task loading. Anyway it wrote off dive 1 for me, I spent the entire dive head down with floaty feet. I didn’t practice any skills and spent 25 minutes at the surface waiting for the rest of the group. The advice I got was to straighten my legs out – however my feet were buoyant so that only made matters much worse.

Dive 2 and I switched to a single but was really missing my ankle weights as this was only second dive in a drysuit without them – led to floaty feet again although not as bad as with the twins. However I was able to do some of the skills albeit often head down. I went back to the B&B on saturday night very fed up and pretty ready to give up.

Sunday morning I spoke to Andy K and his recommendation was Jet Fins. Adam Hanlon (training manager at Capernwray) lent me his own pair for dive 3 and 4 and they made a huge difference compared to my Mares fins. They put some negative buoyancy near my feet and actually made a lot of the kicks easier.

So dive 3 and I felt I could actually start to learn something and progress. Worked a lot on keeping our three man team together – we discussed it before the dive and resolved that would be the best thing we could do. We practised the different fin kicks and the various basic skills including long hose deployment and valve drills. We also had a few emergencies sprung on us. We tried some ascent drills, 1min at 6m, 1min at 3m, 1min head down at surface then back down in reverse. Three man teams did seem to make ascents harder to organise, it did get a bit easier with practise. All the skills are fairly easy but the difficulty arises from trying to do them horizontal a few feet off the bottom without changing depth or reverting to being upright (amazingly instinctive reaction).

Dive 4 and it’s more skills, had a dismal loss of mask drill where I ended up on the surface. Also did an SMB deployment with a spool for the first time that was different. Caught sight of And and the video camera and started dropping things – long hose, spool, double ender! Still at least I provided some entertainment.

Next was off to the pool for 275m swim (any style) in 14 minutes which was dead easy, followed by a 20m breath hold which I found easy as well. Then it was back to the dive center for the video and debrief.

Overall I did learn a lot from the course, however poor kit and the daft idea of trying twins wrote off the first two dives for me. I built a little confidence on the second day but I’ve come away feeling very under-skilled. It’s certainly made me rethink my own belief that I was a competent diver. I got the impression that this was partly the idea, they want to shake you out of complacency and really make you re-think how you dive.

Really did appreciate the help from the rest of the group and from our video helpers. We all managed to laugh at our appalling efforts on the video which did raise the humour level. The humming to the under water conducting (waving your hands all the time) was very amusing. And special mention has to go the underwater baptism’s and praying (The praying followed a valve drill where having shut down his left post, a nameless individual had the misfortune to unclip his light head rather than his long hose and was rather surprised when he couldn’t breathe from it) .

Don’t know how everyone else did as I shot off straight after my debrief as I had a long drive back to Cheltenham. I got a provisional pass which means I need to go away and practice with some other fundy’s training people and come back to have my skills re-evaluated.