Written 3-12-07:

3-10-07 Dives

I managed to get in three more dives this weekend: two on Saturday and one on Sunday.

So that brings my dive total to a whopping 18! I'm trying to get my time in so I can get my advanced open water certification (25 dives), I already have the specialties.

I'm gaining so much experience from every single dive and I read about it constantly. Magazines from PADI, Scuba News, Dive Alert, anything I can get my hands on. I'm also reading through the Rescue Diver manual as that's something we'll be doing in a few months. THAT is going to be seriously challenging.

Back to the dives:

First dive on Saturday went pretty well although I was still pretty apprehensive about getting back into the COLD water, especially after Friday's not-so-drysuit dive. I made sure that the bib of my hood was outside of the drysuit neck seal.

Hood out, drysuit hose hooked up, weighted with 16 lb., using a 150 fleece instead of Michael's 300 fleece, etc. Good to go. And off into the water we went.

He took the lead and off we went on the same initial tour that I went on with Dave although we went between the two rock walls on the side of the crusher, about 42' depth. Michael went first, floated down pretty as could be and I stayed and watched. I checked out the sides to see what was around, gauged the width and went down in. (I'm finding that I'm what they call a "conservative diver". I think this is a good thing.)

Pretty cool. Then off to the bus and the airplane (where I left Mel a short message on the side towards the beach entrance). We finned under the backside of the plane, not sure what the clearance is for it, not tight but had no buoyancy issues and glided under and out without touching either the plane or the bottom.

Then it was back to the docks.

Michael has had way, way more experience diving than I have and I know he took it "easy" and kept it relatively safe for me since it was only my second time in the quarry and 4th or so dive in a drysuit.

Second dive I got a bit more adventurous. On my first quarry dive, there are some girders at the rock crusher and Dave had glided down in between them and back up, I assessed it, decided that nope, not ready for that kind of maneuvering yet and just floated over the top and joined him on the other side. The second dive with Michael, I did what Dave did the first dive and again, didn't touch anything. Down through, up through and no touching of anything. Yay!

One thing: we went back into the plane and I had a little incident. Not serious but I'm glad it happened because it really got across a point or two.

Here's the deal:

On the second dive, I had added a fleece vest (xlarge, too big but I was cooooooold from the first dive), this affected my buoyancy for the whole dive because I failed to take into account the added fleece and didn't add any more weight to my unit, still diving 16 lb. This was not enough with that large fleece added to the setup. I didn't pop to the surface at any time and never started ascending faster than was good but I was working pretty hard on staying down and neutral and when I entered the plane and angled my body to the left turn to go to the front, I floated up to the ceiling.

Not necessarily a big deal but I backfinned (or something that's supposed to resemble it) to back up and get back down to mid-water inside the plane and I didn't move. I felt a tug at the top of my tank and knew it was caught on something. Michael had his back to me so didn't see the problem but after a split second of that "oh NO!" feeling which passed, I reached up and behind me, pushed off the top forward a little and down and it came free. I was more concerned that I may have snagged a hose more than anything else, had Michael check it but it was fine. *pshew*

People are NOT kidding when they say it's very important to have penetration training of some sort to deal with wrecks. I need to take care of that pretty soon. I'd like to explore down through the crusher a bit more but not until I've got some more dives and training under my belt.

Michael was complimentary because he saw the issues I was having with buoyancy and instead of panicking and going to the surface, I'd dive further down to get a handle on the buoyancy without any panic. Using self-control and thinking through what was going on and figuring out the best way to handle it.

During the safety stop, I started becoming even more positively buoyant and Michael grabbed what was handy to keep me at depth for the 3 minutes: two rocks. Hey, it worked!

He asked me later if I knew what he was doing and I said, "well yeah, I didn't think you'd taken up rock collecting all of a sudden. ;)" But he thought of it and I didn't: that's smart with a capital A.

The things you learn each time you dive. It's amazing. Experience and doing really is the best way to learn. Reading and studying is not the same as doing.

With all that, it was a good dive.

~~~

3-11-07 Dive

On Sunday, we dove only one dive but it was pretty neat. We went further out, down to some 50-60' depth and swam through some boulders left behind. I LOVED that. Weaving in and out of the rocks, making sure to go up and down without touching them. I think I reached 63' on that dive. We were out for about 40 minutes.

My air consumption rate was decent (from what Dave and Michael have said), which I feel doubtful about myself but I'll take their word since they have more experience. I felt like I was chugging air down like a steam engine the whole time. I started off with 3250 (I think) and ended with 1250. Used a HP85 steel tank. Nitrox mix.

I'm not sure I see the benefits yet of Nitrox. I think that will play a larger part when I do a dive trip and start doing 2-3 dives per day for 2 or more days. We'll see.

I did wear the 150 fleece and the vest and added 4 more lb. of weight which worked great. So, 20 lb. needed with that setup.

I wanted to get some pics but figured I had enough taskloading going on without worrying about that just yet. Maybe after a few more dives, I'll feel comfortable enough to add that back in.

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