While I apologize for my absence, It became clear to me after about two weeks of dive school that at least initially it wasn't going to be something requiring weekly updates. At that point, we were basically just doing classroom work on the subject of physics, dive tables, dive planning, and commercial diving equipment and diving only once a week. While it's all incredibly interesting to me, I don't feel like it will be very exciting in a blog! I'll stick to a recap and some highlights of the diving parts. If you're on this blog to look at watches... maybe keep scrolling.
Between week two and now, we've finally completed our pool training and pool skills for scuba diving. This was a relief for everyone as diving to a whopping ten feet in a pool is not a huge adrenaline rush and the type of diving we were doing is a not a barrel of fun. In the pool, we did a heck of a lot of different versions of removing our equipment, turning off our air, swimming somewhere on a breath hold, finding our gear again, and restoring our air. We also jumped into the pool with all of our gear in our hands including our life giving regulator and had to allow ourselves to sink to the bottom and cooly and calmly put everything back on and get the air going again. These are age old scuba confidence builders and hugely improved my comfort in the water and understanding of my gear. Did I mention I was raised amongst tall stalks of corn in the Midwest and am still finding some of this a little bit foreign? I'm getting there!
The pool is also where we practiced every version of out of air emergencies. There is no kind of buddy breathing or octopus breathing we didn't do. Buddy breathing in particular (both a diver and their buddy taking turns on a single regulator) is difficult to time, master, and do safely but I feel a lot better about it now. We had to swim the circumference of the pool with our mask off buddy breathing with a partner who was basically dragging us around since you can't really see without a mask with the chlorine burning your eyes out. That was a real treat.
All this culminated in an underwater "obstacle course" which acted as a sort of test for all of the skills we'd learned. We had to swim under a net, remove our scuba unit and swim through a vertical tunnel, inflate a lift bag to move a weight across the pool, ditch our gear and breath hold swim through a horizontal tunnel to our buddy who would lead us back to our gear, and generally demonstrate our comfort and confidence in the water. This was actually pretty fun.
Finally, a couple weeks ago, we did a beach dive. Beach dives are inherently a little bit of a pain in the ass. For one, you have some distance to carry 60lbs or so of dive gear. For two, no matter what you do, you enter and exit the water covered in sand. And finally, you get to walk into the surf also humping said gear. Admittedly, the surf in Santa Barbara at Leadbetter Beach is non existent but my other points stand.
On our first beach dive we had absolutely unbelievable visibility, easily 75ft. We started with some skin dives equipped only with a mask, snorkel, fins, and weights. Let it be known here if in no other place I'm no free diver. It wasn't so bad. Next we swam back in and grabbed our scuba units. Buddied up, we trudged into the water off the soft sand. We rallied around a dive float and did a couple of check out dives where our instructor watches us carry out some basic scuba skills. After that, we briefly surfaced and were then sent off to do a fun dive. We didn't see much except for the obligatory schools of tiny, hard to identify fish and a sting ray or two. It was mostly just sand, another beach diving issue.
Just this last Tuesday we got to do a boat dive. I was even selected to help launch the MDT program's adorable little 30ft closed cabin motorboat given my Coast Guard experience. It was basically the same dive as the week before except we started from the boat. My classmates, other than the boat crew, had to beach dive and then swim out to the boat to climb on, back roll off, and swim back in. It was a good day to be boat crew.
A note on my personal experience from this dive: I had never done a back roll entry from a boat before. Essentially, the diver sits on the gunwale of the boat with all his gear good to go including having his mask on and his flowing regulator in his mouth. He then lowers his head, grabs his mask and regulator to secure them, and allows himself to fall backwards sometimes with a loving push from someone on deck. It looked easy enough and it was briefly explained by my instructors and so when it was my turn, off I went.
I made a classic mistake. I swung my head backwards as I rolled backwards. I guess I thought I needed to make myself fall backwards. You don't. The full scuba setup on your back and the fact that you're already hanging over the gunwale pretty much handles the going backwards part. You only need to stay rolled forward and keep your mask on your face. The tank valve and my head came to an abrupt meeting somewhere during the roll and I flipped over awkwardly and surfaced a little dazed. I remember Don, my instructor, yelling at me and asking me where my mask was. I didn't know. I reached up for it to find it missing! I was seeing stars at the time and my mask was already on the bottom. A search party was sent down after it and it was eventually found. I was a little embarrassed but the rest of the dive went as well as could be expected given the crap visibility we were diving in. My wife believes I may have a dash of concussion. Oh well, it's certainly not the first and probably not the last.
Next week we're going diving off the Spectre Dive Boat out of Ventura, CA. We're doing at least one deep dive to 130ft which I'm very excited for. Also, we're diving at the Channel Islands which is supposed to have awesome conditions this time of year. Maybe we'll even see some animals! Scuba divers love seeing animals. I'll let you know how it goes.
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