 It appears you have not yet registered with our community. To register for free click here
|
 | |
Trip Reports Good trip reports or articles deserve a place in the library for a while...
 |
| | Article Tools |
| |||||||
| The Cast:
I set off from home at about 4 o’clock and it was already drizzling, and the rain gradually got heavier as I went South towards Portland for the start of our DIR Fundamentals course. Three rainy hours later, crossing the causeway from the mainland, the cloud was so low that I couldn’t see the island, and the wind was starting to pick up too. This would be the theme for the whole course as we were to find out! Having checked into my B&B, I met up with first Jamie (Crispy Fiver) and then Jason (JB2Cool) and Andy Kerslake, and we settled in to the Breakwater for some dinner and a few hours of banter while the others arrived. Andy Kerslake and Rich Walker would both be instructing on the course, ably assisted by John Kendall and David Martin (instructor interns). Howard Payne, who would be my buddy for the whole course arrived later, and Jeremy and Nic Grand-Scrutton (Tricky and TooTricky) were on their way, but arrived after midnight. David Martin was at work in his office in London until 6:30am on Saturday morning getting a document ready for a print deadline, and then left to come straight down to Portland, which was impressive! That made for two instructors, two interns and six of the seven students. Adam (AJ), the seventh student on our course and the manager of Silent Planet in Castletown (you’ll sometimes see him running the fill station at the Breakwater dive centre, or driving a boat or instructing at weekends too), lives locally, so we wouldn’t see him until the next morning. In the bar that evening, there were a few nerves about the course, but I was really looking forward to getting started and seeing how far I had managed to progress in the year since I last attempted Fundies. I was expecting it to be just as hard as before, but hopefully I’d at least be able to do everything this time! For all the others it would be a first time attempt, and it was a bit hard to know what to expect – well, we’d be finding out soon enough! Made it back through pouring rain to my room at the Green Shutters by midnight, ready for a good night’s sleep – hopefully. Day 1 – Saturday 20th May Like every morning (except the last), Day 1 started with breakfast at 8am in the Aqua Café. This first day would be just lectures and the swim tests, with our first diving on Day 2. At 9am, the instructors and interns took turns to cover the different subjects, giving an overview of the course, an introduction to GUE, buoyancy and weighting, balance and trim with some videos of trim at different points in a dive (descents, swimming and ascents). They then covered some finning techniques with more video of frog kicking, modified frog kicking, modified flutter kicking and back kicking, and the situations where each was appropriate. Rich broke down each fin ****** into its component phases and showed us all the important fine details of the techniques. Next was an explanation and video of the ‘Basic 5’ skills which are part of the assessed content of the course, and also begin working up to the S-drills (GUE’s term for an out of gas/out of air drill). The basic 5 (for those who don’t already know) are 1. Reg removal and replacement, 2. Regulator exchange to backup clipping off primary and then unclip and exchange again back to primary, 3. mask flood and clear, 4. mask removal, replacement and clear, and 5. a modified s-drill where the diver doing the skills fully deploys the long hose in front of him to make sure it’s not trapped behind anything, and then re-stows it. The main thing here is that all of these are done horizontally in mid-water, without excessive change in buoyancy and without going off for a swim (you stay stationary, facing your team members throughout). It’s harder than it looks! Then we looked at more air sharing drills (s-drill, how that works in a full simulated OOA situation, OOA ascents), summarised all the skills and drills we would need to pass the course, and listed which ones would be on each dive. That was all before lunch on Day 1! At 1pm, we got changed into our suits and spent some time getting our harnesses adjusted so that they fitted correctly with all the D-rings in the right places. We then changed into normal clothing and went inside (it was raining again by now) to practice s-drills in our buddy pairs in the dry. These have a definite sequence and it’s worth practicing them quite a few times so that you don’t forget an essential step! At 3:30 we moved next door to the Boscawen Pool for the swim tests – a 15m breath-hold swim and a 275m swim in under 14 minutes. Everyone passed comfortably – I was really chuffed to pass the breath hold swim first attempt, as I’d needed abou seven attempts to do it on my previous attempt at Fundies last year. I was slowest on the swim and still finished well within that time. We then spend another half hour or so practicing back-kicking and helicopter turns underwater in the pool (no fins or anything else, just swim trunks and goggles or masks). I was really surprised to discover this works quite well – we even had a back-finning race along the length of the pool (I was last again!). The rest of the afternoon was taken up with more lectures on equipment setup, dive planning, and the pre-dive review. A reassuring quote from Andy Kerslake about the value of a mod-S after kitting up was “I know I’m a muppet and can get it wrong!”. Anyone diving with him – feel free to remind him he said that, if you dare! We finished a long day with a lecture on gas management, and calculations for minimum gas (a.k.a. Rock Bottom) which seemed so much more straightforward than last time I heard it, and on how to manage the remaining available gas for different circumstances of dive (use all available, halfs, thirds – sixths were not mentioned much at this level of course). We ended with a series of gas calculation exercises which I’m ashamed to say I knew perfectly well how to do, but have simply never done on any real dive I’ve done yet, mostly because I don’t yet dive deco or overhead, but it’s shocking how lazy you can become just doing recreational diving, and how presumed safe minimum gas levels in general public recreational diving (e.g. come up with 50 bar) can be wholly inadequate for some dives recreational divers do! We broke for dinner at about 6:30pm and had a meal in the Portland Roads hotel across the road. Dinner was okay, though Howard made what turned out to be a very poor decision – a bowl of mussels for his main course. A couple of beers was more than enough and I sloped off to bed by about 10pm. Day 2 – Sunday 21st May After our 8am breakfast, at 9 we assembled our kit in the classroom and the interns and instructors went over everything with a fine toothcomb checking for compliance with GUE equipment standards and practices. I think we were on balance better informed and prepared for this than some classes, but everyone had a couple of little adjustments to make at least, and even though I thought I would be alright, John still found a couple of boltsnaps I needed to change and retie. Some of the others had slightly more tweaking to do and some hose protectors came off, but nobody had any real howlers, and no-one bit when I casually clipped a reel onto my left d-ring. No fun. At 10am we put the kit on and dry-ran some valve drills, facing our buddies. I’ve had very little practice at this since I started diving twins 6 months and 30 dives ago, as for much of that time I couldn’t reach my valves (for a combination of reasons – poor suit and bad harness fit), and since I got a new suit and harness which work much better, I wanted to wait and be taught v-drills properly on the course. Howard had also waited for the course to learn this. I found this session, like the one on s-drills on Day 1 particularly useful. 10:30 saw us back in the classroom for a quick lecture on dive planning and the pre-dive sequence, emphasising how the pre-dive review is supposed to be a review of a plan you already have, not the time when that plan gets made! Another example of gas planning and a slide on the first of the Four Pillars of DIR (Breathing Gas Concerns) followed, then we broke for lunch. Unfortunately Howard’s mussels from last night had done something dreadful inside him, and we had a whole new kind of gas management issue – it was really something! At 2pm, we met for a dive brief for what were to be dives 1 and 2 of the course. We would start on dive 1 with fin kicks (frog, mod frog, mod flutter) then do a basic 5 and our first v-drills and s-drills underwater. However, once kitted up and out on the boat, our first dive site had far too much swell, and we opted for a second site called the Torpedo Range. Erm…. not a reassuring name! Anyway. John and David dropped in to lay line under the disused building on stilts and came up to signal the rest of us to come in. When we descended it was a bit chaotic – all seven students (who hadn’t learned to recognise each other or the instructors underwater yet) ended up trying to be in the same place, in 3.5m of water with a light current and strong swell and poor vis, surrounded by metal structure. It wasn’t unsafe, but it certainly did make doing anything and organising ourselves difficult. I was not comfortable at all, and when we eventually got ourselves sorted out and into teams for the skills demos, 10 minutes had already passed. Howard and I managed to do our fin-kick circuits (we kept meeting other teams going the other way around the square – oops – need some agreed directions there!) and we got four of the basic five done each, but we had a hard time with cramps and general discomfort about the dive conditions, and both decided on the surface to finish the dive and save the rest for another time. Some of the other teams got a bit more done than Howard and I, but I don’t think anyone finished all the skills before the dive was thumbed. David and John brought the line back up, and we decided against attempting Dive 2, and instead relocated to a spot by the WWII Mulberry floating harbours in Castletown harbour to do weight checks with 30 bar in the tanks. Back on land it was clear that the weather was against us, and we’d have to pick up the dive skills the next day. We debriefed the dives (there was a good lesson to be learned about having everyone know the plan clearly before the dive!) and watched the videos that Rich and Andy had shot. Underwater video is a tool that GUE use to allow students to see exactly what they look like underwater (which is often different from what they think they look like!), and allows a very detailed step-by-step debrief of specific drills. The instructors can pause to point things out, or rewind and play bits again that are appropriate to certain teaching points, such as a divers’ trim and body position when at rest vs when performing a skill, what their fins are doing, whether they’ve forgotten to clip something off, or whether you ended up separated from your team or floating up, or swimming around too much while doing a skill. The video also captures beautifully all those little moments when you screwed something up (or got something right for once!) – thanks guys! It’s a fantastic learning tool, and it’s a huge addition to the value of a GUE course. Dinner was in the Weymouth Balti House for a great curry. On the way there in Howard’s car, we had three SavNav GPS devices competing to tell us the way, apparrently mine had the sexiest voice, but none of them disagreed or started to argue with each other, which was dissapointing. Also I have to confess my curry (a Chicken Kashmir) was probably the gayest meal I’ve ever seen; sort of a pale and creamy coconut curry sauce topped with chunks of banana, lychees and no kidding: a glacé cherry! I will definitely have to order something a bit more manly next time. A top night out – I like that place. Day 3 – Monday 22nd May I got to the café a bit early for breakfast, to be asked by the chef who was opening up the place if a car parked outside was ours, as apparently it was blocking the entrance to the boatyard next door and a big crane was on its way to lift some boats out of the water, and the police had said if it wasn’t moved by 8am, it would be impounded! A few hurried phone calls failed to reveal the owner, but a jiffy bag in the back had the recorded delivery sticker from R3 Midlands on it – some nice shiny diving niknaks from Phill! Must belong to one of us! Eventually the owner (it was one of us!) was found and the car was moved. However, there was no crane by 9am, and there was acres of space to drive around the car, so it was all a bit unnecessary really. Oh well… After yesterday’s dive we had a good look at the weather forcast, which basically said rain, wind, wind and rain, heavy rain and wind, followed by heavy wind and rain. Here’s the satellite picture of the low pressure system over Britain on Monday morning:  .Nice. We would have preferred to find another dive site if we could. However, Vobster, the only real option, is normally closed on a Monday and Tuesday, so that wasn’t possible for today. At 9:30, while we we were waiting for our cylinders to be filled by Andy the boat skipper (as no-one else was around to do it), Andy Kerslake and Rich kicked off some more lectures about minimum deco, during which he pieced together a number of things I had previously half-learnt about deco, into a cohesive picture, and showed us a lot about how decompression calculations are done. We had a very long discussion of decompression, how different breathing gasses affect it, decompression planning with software (DecoPlanner was used for examples and it looks good, but Andy was careful not to emphasize his tool over others) and dive computers. They talked about the several physiological effects of decompression and long term diving. Jamie came up with a classic quote “I do think that since I’ve been diving, I’ve become more thicker”.Lol. Next we calclated our surface air consumption rates (SACs) from our first dive, and fed that back into the gas management examples from Days 1&2 using our real SACs instead of the ‘standard’ rates (20 l/min at rest and 30 l/min in an emergency, though they suggested it could go up to 100+ l/min in a panic), and then as the cylinders were still not filled yet, Andy started the lectures on Nitrox (a new part of the Fundamentals course). After those, we practiced some more gas calcs, down to the point of working out, based on a number of known variables (e.g. available tank sizes and fill pressure, team SAC rates, planned depth)
Rich and Andy covered the final part of the Nitrox theory, looking at Pulminory and Central Nervous System Oxygen Toxicity, what they were, how oxygen exposures to avoid these effects were calculated and how some quick mental battlefield calculations for these were so easy that you should easily be able to do them before every dive. We also talked about the advantates of using richer mixes (50% Nitrox, pure O2) for deco, but how you needed to plan for air breaks on longer deco stops to give your poor lungs a chance to rest. By this time it was midday and we were ready to brief the dives of the day. They were essentially to be the same as the two dives planned on Day 1, as we had not really been able to do them properly (at all) on Day 1. Andy explained that during the back-kicks, he might take our fins and lead them in the path they should be going: “so if I take you from behind, don’t struggle, just relax”. Nice. We broke for lunch at 1:30, though there were still severe issues with Howard’s gas management and at one point I had to go sit at the other end of the table – sorry mate, that was nasty! “I shouldn’t have had the mussles” was the understatement of the week! We got together to get kitted up at 2:30 for a 3pm ropes off. This time we motored out to the dredger, which in good conditions can be a nice wreck in about 8-9m of water. However, conditions were not very good this time! Somehow David and John managed to get line laid, with line arrows this time! But the swell was something else, and the water was full of silt and big pieces of seaweed being churned around. Howard said it was like diving in miso soup, and although some of the teams somehow managed to get a bit of the dive skills done, Howard and I were just asked by David to hold from the moment we got to the bottom of the shot line, and we held on in the swell and muck and weed until 15 minutes later when the dive got thumbed. Back on the boat the surge had picked up even more and was now crashing against the breakwater! Howard and I were a bit dissapointed that the conditions had beaten us again, as we had felt much more comfortable than yesterday in the water. But watching demos, doing skills and being videod would have been completely impossible, so it couldn’t be helped – it had been worth a try, but there wasn’t any other option than to call it and try again tomorrow somewhere else. The boat ride back was dominated by conversations about what we could do to get the dives done as we had really covered very little of the in-water skills by this stage, and hadn’t had much practice time to polish what we could do. The only two options were to head up to Stoney Cove, which was open but four hours drive away, or to Vobster quay, which was only two hours away but is normally closed on a Tuesday. The pool was a very distant and frankly unsatisfactory last option – none of us wanted that. While it was sorted out, we retired to the classroom to finish off the last couple of hours of lectures. We finished off the remaining three Pillars of DIR (Unified Team, Diver Preparedness, Situational Awareness (Team, Equipment and Environment)), which really drove home some very key points about why DIR is such a powerful system of diving and why it all needs to go together to make your team a safe one. It also shows how hard it would be to achieve this level of competence without such a system, and makes you question the sense of doing some of the dives you’ve done in the past! A few telephone calls behind the scenes to Jason Bardo (or is it Brown?) at Vobster Quay were made, and by the end of the night at dinner in the Royal Breakwater, we had a plan. Day 4 – Tuesday 23rd May Predictably, the weather today was calm(ish) and sunny, but the vis in the sea would have still been rubbish, so it didn’t make any difference. At 7:15am we all headed off for Vobster Quay, stopping for some breakfast on the way and arrived about 10am. Having Vobster to yourself on a nice day is a great experience, and we’re really grateful to Jason (Bardo) for opening the place up for us. He was running the place all by himself, just for the eleven of us – admissions, gas fills, food, the lot! Of course the water was flat calm and had no current which was a very nice change from the seas we’d had the last couple of days in Portland! A shame not to be able to complete the course in ‘real conditions’ in the sea, but we needed to get a lot done on the last day, so it was definitely a break we needed. We analysed our tanks and kitted up for dives one and two of the four (!) we planned for today, and hit the water some time around 11am. The first dive was to be some skills from Dive 1 of the course – valve drills, s-drills, frog, modified frog and mod. flutter kicks, with an SMB deployment at the end. We descended to the platforms, and Howard and I got through everything, though it was pretty scrappy. Dive two was better – Howard and I descended and formed up on the platform near Nic and Jeremy. We did another valve and s-drill, which went significantly better for both of us (though still not perfect), and then all four of us lined up along the bar at the edge of the platform to watch Andy demonstrate some skills. First, center of gravity drill (which we all then came forward to do in turn) then back kicks and helicopter turns which we all came forward again to do. As we watched, we all held position reasonably well along the bar, back kicking whenever we needed to. However, as soon as any of us was out front to do our back kicks, it all fell apart and we couldn’t do it! Typical. Then we shot bags again, and this time it was much better – we held formation better and had fairly nicely controlled ascents. After those two dives we jumped out, got our tanks in for fills (thanks again to Bardo!), and scooted upstairs to the classroom to debrief and review the video. Lots to learn from that as usual, and it’s amazing how different you actually are underwater from how you think you are. And what you forgot to clip off that you didn’t even know about during the dive! Jason Bardo wanted to get away by 5, so at 4pm we cut short the video review and got our kit together for the last session in water. We re-descended onto the platform, and did flow checks and S-drills, which went better still (nice and still in position, good trim, feeling comfortable). Then was another run at the basic five which we hadn’t completed on Day 2 – this time they went much better, and both Howard and I got through the mask removal and replacement without losing buoyancy too badly – Howard did touch down gently on the platform, and I drifted up what felt like about 1m, but he thought it was less. Thank goodness for 14 degree C fresh water – but we will have to go practice this in less plesasnt conditions when we want to progress further – mask-off stuff is a definite weak point for me at the moment. Then the fun stuff started – we got started on a 6-3-0-3-6m ascent-descent drill, but we didn’t hold the stops too well and were late throughout. Then Howard got cramp and we had to pause on the surface. Jeremy (Tricky) was also on the surface, having had a sinus squeeze on a descent with Nic, so he elected to sit out the rest of this dive. This put Nic in a three with me and Howard, and we descended again. We got a bit separated on descent, and left Howard behind, so Rich hit him with an OOA which took me and Nic about 30 seconds to notice (we didn’t see his less-than-frantic light signals). I donated to Howard, but at the time had no idea how long he’d been OOA. Nasty. We then tried to do an air-sharing ascent as a three, which went quite badly and ended up with Howard surfacing ahead of Nic and me, having had to spit my long hose reg and switch to his own backup as he went up. Not good – a team failure there. We regrouped and descended again, closer together this time. On the platform we formed up and as captain, I called out the revised team order (too late – we should have done this on the surface before our first descent). I also made an error in that I put Nic in at #2 and Howard who had a crampy leg at #3. D’oh. Wounded diver goes in front in a pair, or at #2 in a three. We were asked to go for a ‘little swim’ together, but I’ve dived enough with DIR trained divers to have a fair idea what was coming next! Howard, at the back was asked to hold to see if Nic and I would swim off, but as we hadn’t really got our light spots in the right place (Nic’s was a bit too far back for me to see it), I was turning around every few seconds anyway to see if they both were still with me. Nic was on the ball too, and we saw that we were getting separated (by about 5m) from Howard, so we turned around. At this point, Rich hit Nic with an OOA, and being closest I donated again. Fortunately, despite all our other mistakes, we got something right, as we didn’t forget about Howard. We made sure Nic had gas and we were stable in the water, and we looked around for Howard, who was making his way to Nic’s other side to sandwich the OOG diver. This done, we started a short swim (another mistake probably, but one that comes from doing S-drills which involve a swim – should we change that to an ascent of 3m for Open Water diving?). Rich (or was it David Martin?) stopped us and someone – Nic? – correctly thumbed the dive. Fine – air sharing ascent it is then. We didn’t shoot a bag (this was mentioned in the debrief, though I’m not sure if we were supposed to or not). The ascent as a three was okay from 6 to 3m, but we then levelled out to do a 1min stop at 3m, and Rich asked us to not do the deco stop and ascend directly to the surface, which we did. However, again we lost some control of our ascent rate and came up quicker than we ought to have, fortunately together this time. That was the end of the dive and the practical part of the course. We exited the water, dekitted and packed up to go. I was quite annoyed with myself when I got changed and packed away, as I felt we all had the ability to do all those skills correctly, but definitely hadn’t. Perhaps with one more dive we’d have been able to do it, but there wasn’t time. We left Vobster at 6pm (sorry Jason!) and went in convoy to the pub in Frome for debriefs, video and our one-on-ones. Again, it showed us how much we still all had to learn, and how useful the video is as an educational tool. So, how did we do? No one failed the course, despite all the difficulties in the conditions on days 2 and 3. Jamie (Crispy Fiver) and Jason got Provisionals (yes, you can still get them), but I’m sure they’ll get some extra polish on their skills and be back to pass soon! Jeremy Grand-Scrutton (Tricky), his brother Nic (TooTricky), Howard and I all got Recreational Passes, and we’ll all need to do a little polishing of our skills, particularly ascents and descents in the case of Howard and me, to get the upgrade to the Tech Pass. I hope we can do that in a couple of months time or so! Adam (AJ) got the UK’s first Tech Pass – huge congratulations, and it was a total pleasure having him on the course. I don’t know whether he’s on DIRX, but if not we’ll have to make sure he is! Thank you so much to everyone on the course for an awesome four days – we laughed, we cried, we ached, and we all got through it with a smile (and some breath-hold runs to the other side of the room). I hope to dive with all of you guys again, as soon as possible. |
| ||||||
  | |||||||
