LCF(Offline)

Two weeks ago, my long-term dive buddy and Rec Triox partner, Kirk, and I headed down to Mexico to do Cave 1 with Danny Riordan. We met up with a previously unknown third teammate, a very pleasant young man from Norway, and the three of us entered the Cave 1 machine on Monday, April 28, to emerge somewhat bloody and not entirely unbowed five days later.

You have all read descriptions of the class -- five days of dives in the overhead, progressive in their presentation of failures and problems to solve, and implacable in their ability to highlight any failure of technique or judgment. I won't bother to detail the dives one by one (assuming I could even reconstruct them) but I thought I'd list the underlying lessons I think were there.


1) Good building blocks are critical. If your technique in doing S-drills or valve shutdowns is flawed, it will not improve under stress or in the overhead environment. Small flaws are magnified in an environment where time is gas is remaining survival. Practicing meticulous technique is critical to one of the main goals of overhead problem solving, which is keeping everyone involved calm and rational.

2) The incident pit is real. No one error is likely to be critical. As Danny said repeatedly, we will all make mistakes. One of the benefits of being in a three man team of equally well-trained divers is that the vast majority of errors will be detected, and can be corrected, before they have a chance to blossom into a multifaceted screwup.



3) Errors are predictable, and tend to be repeated, at least in kind. If your weak area is awareness, it will get you into trouble repeatedly. One of my weak areas is a strong compulsion to remove everything I placed in the cave, regardless of the circumstances of the exit. It became a joke, that I valued my teammates less than the cost of a Halcyon reel, but it really wasn't funny.

4) Physical stamina is a big part of this class. Our days ran from 7:30 in the morning and often until 10 at night. Food was what we managed to bring with us, and had my husband not been with us and uninvolved in the class, dinner might well have been nonexistent. By day 5, we were all tired, and we were making mistakes as a result. Underlying lesson: Do not dive in this environment when severely fatigued. (I had learned this one before.)

5) Attention to detail is rewarded. I honestly thought Danny was a bit over the top with some of the things he criticized -- He didn't like the way I had tied the loops in my pockets, for God's sake! I couldn't get them undone during class (and I have to admit I wasn't highly motivated to work very hard at it), but after getting caught in the line twice in the dives after class because of it, the loops got redone.



6) The specific scenarios you work through in class are unlikely, sometimes vanishingly so. What is not unlikely is to have problems; problems happen, and in one week of post-class diving, we had everything from primary light failures to burst disc leaks. What was universally true was that, whatever the problem was, it was addressed in a calm and rational fashion, and appropriate action was taken almost without any significant thought on the part of the team.

I had taken Cavern and Intro through another agency before taking Cave 1, and I have to say that there was no comparison in the classes. My prior course was like Cave Fundies; we were presented with skills and executed them, but they were not integrated into the dive, there was no real problem-solving, and the concept of operating as a team was not even addressed. The sheer amount of information presented in this class was daunting but at the same time exhilarating; the standards to which we were held were sometimes discouraging but, in the end, clearly appropriate.

The best evaluation of the class was the week of diving we did after it was over. We dove caves we knew, and caves which were new to us, and we dove with more experienced buddies and without them. We encountered various difficulties, and had some uneventful dives, and through it all, we remained methodical and calm and amazed at the beauty of the environment into which we now had entry. No class creates a diver, but a good one can graduate someone who is ready to allow appropriate experience to begin to build real skill, and I think we walked out of Cave 1 with what we needed to be safe and to enjoy ourselves, while we are learning to be cave divers.

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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

vid(Offline)

a good write up, beautiful pics and a big well done

vid

Alastair(Offline)

Nice write-up and lovely pics - did you choose Dos Ojos or was it Danny's suggestion? It gives some real variety to the photos so it seems to be an excellent choice.

Cheers
Al

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MonkSeal(Offline)

Congratulations! However, you have to adjust the dates in text and thread title: "Cave 1 with Danny, April 08".

Leigh u(Offline)

good job..and a refreshingly different style of report..

congrats

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Howard Payne(Offline)

Rings very true from my own Cave 1 course - spot on.

Danny really is a cool photographer

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LCF(Offline)

Dos Ojos was Danny's choice, because there are some favorite spots where he likes to pose divers. Doing the photo shoot with him was a kick -- He takes his photography VERY seriously. We had an hour-long orientation, where he explained what he wanted us to do and how he would communicate it. What he didn't say was that, as he got more worked up, the signals would begin to resemble those of a semaphore operator on cocaine. When we didn't get it figured out properly, he would tear his hair out, and once or twice, he just slumped forward in the water (sign language for "you're killing me here", I think). When we surfaced after the first dive, he actually apologized, saying, "Don't take it personally, guys, I just get very passionate about my pictures."

I think you can see that passion gets rewarded with some pretty amazing results

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check out www.divematrix.com

"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

limeyx(Offline)

Again, my sincere congratulations, I know how hard you worked for this one.

Now the countdown begins to the next trip ?

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LCF(Offline)

Oh, I'm scheming for Thanksgiving!

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check out www.divematrix.com

"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

rjack(Offline)

This writeup is quite different from your other class comparisons
Super, super glad you hit it off with Danny, learned alot, and passed . THAT is what all that GUE-F stuff is for!!

BrianW and myself are scheming for December, right before high season prices start.