| Cave 1 redux
I just got back from another trip to Mexico, but this one didn't turn out much as I had planned it.
Originally, I was going to go down on Thursday, and dive Friday through Sunday with KMD. Rjack would be diving with his wife for her Cave 1 reeval. Kevin and Richard would then start Cave 2 on Monday. Melody and I would dive together Monday, and she was going home Tuesday. I was going to hire a guide for Tuesday and Wednesday, and then head home.
Well, all those neatly laid plans got jettisoned when we got to Mexico and discovered Chris was going to be unable to teach Richard and Kevin's class. Danny was going to take it over, but he had obligations Tuesday through Thursday, so they were told they had to start immediately. This left both me and Melody without a dive buddy for the weekend, and as a result, I joined her for the reeval dives.
Well, over the next three days, I basically did Cave 1 over again. With the exception of lost line, we did all the drills, except that, unlike in class, they weren't telegraphed. Lost buddy was losing Fred, who had darted into a side passage. Our air-sharing lights out exit was handling a couple of failures that turned into an air-share, and then having Fred come up, put us on the line and turn the lights out.
At any rate, although it wasn't what I had planned or hoped for during the trip (I'd hoped to hit a few more sections of cave I hadn't seen yet), it proved enormously valuable. We didn't execute everything absolutely perfectly, but we handled everything with quite a bit of aplomb, and on my part, no anxiety whatsoever. As Fred said, their training strategy is to get students to where, if something does go south on a dive, the reaction is, "Oh (yawn) this again . . . " I'm not sure that would be the case in a real emergency, but I have to say that my response during these dives was precisely that.
If anybody ever gets a chance to do this, I highly recommend it. It was a lovely way of cementing skills and getting another opportunity to have some feedback from a superb instructor.
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"So, it's a good thing to always do the drills the same way . . . but in real life you need to act the right way, whatever that happens to be." LauNar |