This weekend was the final part of my TDI trimix course with Frank Bruce of E-Aquanauts. We were at the NDAC for the weekend and our first dive was a trimix dive to 48m on 21/35. I struggled to get to grips with diving with Mal as there was a difference in what he’s learnt being non GUE trained. As Mal described it was like talking to foreigners! This led to some confusion and not the smoothest ascent. I had an issue at depth when I couldn’t re-clip my guage. I asked Clare to help but lost buoyancy and started going up. However I couldn’t reach my rear dump as Clare was in the way, stupidly I didn’t use the front dump. This led to us popping up 3m before I got it sorted which was piss poor. I must admit I found the narcosis quite noticeable on this dive which was a bit odd. Later on the ascent I managed to lose one of my stage bands which proved to make restowing the reg a pain. My first genuine 2 stage deco dive and I have to say I wasn’t happy with how it went.
Second dive of the day was a skills dive. I’d traded twinsets and now got my 32% set on. I felt much more comfortable on this dive and generally found it quite straightforward to begin with. Clare had a primary light failure so we re-ordered putting her in second place. Shortly after I had a light failure (position 3) and we again need to re-order. At this point Clare went out of gas. This was swiftly followed by Mal going blind. At this point Mal didn’t understand the blind signals which meant we started ascending too rapidly. There was a moments confusion where I reached in to clip off Mal’s torch and Clare thought I was going to drive Mal and let go. This was very quickly corrected but none the less we were losing bouyancy. Frank cancelled the drill and we sorted our depth out. Thumbs was issued and we started up. Again not the smoothest ascent.
Although the dives may have met the grade I wasn’t happy with how they went. Frank’s feedback was we needed to slow it down and ensure we maintained control.
Sunday and our 57m dive was planned. We had quite a delay with getting Clare’s set filled as it had gone rich overnight. We kitted up and dropped in. This time we went down the shotline like we geniunely would do. We also set off for the dive with a purpose and I definitely felt it had come together much better. Mal thumbed the dive at minimum gas and we started our ascent. Deep stops went to plan and were pretty steady. At 21m Clare’s 50% bottle free-flowed and she attempted to fix it. I held station and tried to provide a depth reference as two of us were already on the 50%. Frank felt I should have stepped in and helped Clare out so he did. He re-tightened the reg and it started working. We started timimg the stops and moved on through the schedule. Overall the team wasn’t always in the same place and it was just not precise.
In summing up I guess the big lessons were around awareness, dealing with failures and communication. The technical element is easy – getting a team working well together and dealing with failures is difficult. From the first day I felt I needed to slow down and be more controlled. From the second day I felt it was a lesson in taking more decisive control. Overall I think we need to work out on buoyancy control to a higher level of perfection – as we were told 19.9m is not 21m.
I passed the course but as Frank said he was looking for a level above that from us and we still have a lot to do before the summer. In some ways it’s odd to have passed a course yet feel that I haven’t acheived what I should have done!