Confined Water Dive 4
Well, I successfully completed my fourth confined water dive. During the knowledge review this week we went over dive tables and how to plan dives. I had read up on these already and didn't have any real issues. A couple people had minor difficulty including one person whose dive table instruction book had been destroyed before he had a chance to read it. I loaned him mine for the week so that he has a chance to look through it. By the end of the knowledge review everyone seemed to have a decent understanding of the dive tables and could probably plan a couple dives without any real trouble. Most of the difficulty is introduced when you add a third dive to the sequence and it doesn't seem likely that any of us will need to worry about that in the immediate future.
We practiced ascents and descents which would have been dramatically more interesting if the pool was more than seven feet deep. As it was ascending and descending wasn't all that big a deal. I do appear to be one of the people whose ears are affected by very minor pressure changes since I needed to equalize frequently even in seven feet of water.
We practiced removing and replacing our scuba unit both on the surface and underwater. It wasn't terribly difficult other than the issue I had with my body wanting to float to the surface once I became detached from my BCD and the 20 pounds of lead weight which it contained. Finding the buckles underwater is kind of a pain but isn't really hard if you take your time. It did; however, make me desire my own equipment so that I could begin to get use to it.
One of the buddy procedures we practiced this week was signaling out of air and buddy breath followed by your buddy handing you his octo. When it was my turn to signal out of air it took my buddy a good thirty seconds to find his alternate before he could hand it over. It was a pretty telling example of why we practice these things and why it's critical to be comfortable with your equipment.
Once we had completed the required skills, Tom gave us some time to swim around and practice stuff. I spent most of my time practicing buoyancy control with my BCD and by controlling the amount of air in my lungs. I was fairly happy with my performance as I hovered at about five feet although I did bob up to about two feet a couple times. The class this week was great fun and I'm looking forward to the final confined water dive next week. After that it's off to Lake 16 (a particularly unimaginative name for a lake) where we will do our open water dives.
We practiced ascents and descents which would have been dramatically more interesting if the pool was more than seven feet deep. As it was ascending and descending wasn't all that big a deal. I do appear to be one of the people whose ears are affected by very minor pressure changes since I needed to equalize frequently even in seven feet of water.
We practiced removing and replacing our scuba unit both on the surface and underwater. It wasn't terribly difficult other than the issue I had with my body wanting to float to the surface once I became detached from my BCD and the 20 pounds of lead weight which it contained. Finding the buckles underwater is kind of a pain but isn't really hard if you take your time. It did; however, make me desire my own equipment so that I could begin to get use to it.
One of the buddy procedures we practiced this week was signaling out of air and buddy breath followed by your buddy handing you his octo. When it was my turn to signal out of air it took my buddy a good thirty seconds to find his alternate before he could hand it over. It was a pretty telling example of why we practice these things and why it's critical to be comfortable with your equipment.
Once we had completed the required skills, Tom gave us some time to swim around and practice stuff. I spent most of my time practicing buoyancy control with my BCD and by controlling the amount of air in my lungs. I was fairly happy with my performance as I hovered at about five feet although I did bob up to about two feet a couple times. The class this week was great fun and I'm looking forward to the final confined water dive next week. After that it's off to Lake 16 (a particularly unimaginative name for a lake) where we will do our open water dives.
posted by KzooJason at 9:27 PM
2 Comments:
Sounds like fun to me Jason. Except for the taking your BC off underwater test. Probably one of the hardest tests for me, and one of the funniest for everyone else in my class. I float with a vengance with no wetsuit, so put in one and send me to the bottom of the pool and ask me to take off my weight integrated BC...hilarity ensues...for everyone else. I'm floating above my tank hugging it desperately to my chest. If I let go, I'm going to rocket to the surface. Now I have to somehow get it back around to its proper position. Sheesh. By the way, what is that dive board you found? Dave told me you found one, but couldn't remember the name of it.
I'm not sure why it's so much fun, but isn't it great to just hover in the water? Sounds like you have the same deal I do, in terms of pressure issues. I have to equalize quite a bit at first. I've notices that on longer dives, once I get to depth I'm ok to move up and down quite a bit.
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