Mark's Dive Log

Last night I had my dry suit class and pool session. The class stuff is all pretty straight forward, but I've been told by many people that your first time in a dry suit is like starting all over. I always figured that as an exaggeration. Was I wrong.

The class was an interesting start. There are four of us taking the class. One guy has to work, so he's going to take the classroom/pool session next week. Another guy works third shift and had a late night call that kept way past his normal shift end time, so he couldn't make it. The other guy just never showed up. There were three instructors and me. No pressure there. Fortunately, the class material is pretty simple and I was well prepared.

After class we headed to the pool. Before last night, I had only been in dry suit once and that was last week to find one that fit for the class. Last night was my first time in the water in the suit. I had read the material, watched the DVD, talked with several dry suit divers, and read a lot of information on the Internet, so I felt that I was as prepared as I could be. And I suppose I was, but that doesn't really help you when you get wet - or hopefully don't get wet - for the first time.

So the first thing we have to do is get into the thing. The suit I used was a front entry suit, meaning it has a zipper in the front going from the left shoulder to the right hip. It's easy to get your feet and one arm in. The second arm isn't too bad, but then you have to squeeze your head through an opening that has to seal water out around your neck. It's a tight fit anyway, but to make things more interesting, you don't have a lot of slack to play with because your arms are already in the arms of the suit.

Anyway, we now have the suit on and zipped up. The next step is to get the excess air (or at least as much as you can) out of the suit. You do that by pulling open the neck seal and squatting down. Then you release the neck seal and stand up. Up until now, the dry suit has been relatively comfortable. Now the dry suit is squeezing up against your body. If you are claustrophobic, this might not be for you. But it's not over yet.

Now we get into the water. Since this is a pool and the first time in a dry suit, we left the gear on the side of the pool and just got in. Someone told me that just jumping in with a dry suit on can be pain full as the suit suddenly starts squeezing you in, well, let's just say sensitive areas. So I climbed in using the pool ladder. Now I'm feeling some suit squeeze. And I'm standing in three feet of water. I'm not looking forward to what this is going to feel like at 100 feet.

It's time to put our scuba gear on and start playing with the suit. We start off in the shallow end and swim to the deep end along the bottom of the pool. I'm immediately feeling out of control. I can't keep my feet down without considerable effort, kicking is almost impossible, and buoyancy control is something that I think I heard about once, but not something I can be accused of having.

I haven't decided yet whether or not the problem I was having with my fins was from my feet flopping around in the suit or the fins flopping around on the suit. Probably the former. I've decided that when I get my own suit, I'm going to get a better fit in the foot. The flopping caused my feet to cramp up, which is not comfortable in the best of circumstances.

The related problem was all the air in the suit kept going to my feet. Even when I went from standing to horizontal, the air quickly migrated from my back to my feet. Trying to get my feet down so I could kick was impossible. I was able to do a cave diving (bent knee) kick, but the basic flutter kick wasn't happening. Picking a dry suit with soft booties and a separate boot seems to be the answer to both of my problems. I could use ankle weights to solve the kicking problem, but it seems highly inefficient. Kind of like driving with your parking brake on.

The final problem, buoyancy control, was the only one I really made any progress on. After we went through the drills, which included standing me on my head and inflating the dry suit to practice rolling right side up and dumping the air before you get to the surface, I got a chance to just swim around trying to get my buoyancy and trim under control. I almost managed to get my buoyancy to an acceptable level, but my trim isn't even close yet. I'm all over the place. So I need to work on that.

Doc, my instructor, caught me off guard with and OOA signal. I was confused because I was trying to figure out whether or not this was some kind of dry suit specific signal. He gave it to me again, so I handed him my octo and he later scolded me for being so slow about it. That's what you call a learning opportunity.

In the end Doc said that he felt my acclimation was good for a first time. I sure don't, but he's the instructor. Of course, he probably says that to all but the really bad students.

A couple of final notes: in the humid pool room at the YMCA, wearing the dry suit was like wearing your own little personal oven. It was OK once I was in the water, but out of the water was brutal. I'm dreading what it would be like on a hot summer day prepping for a nice long deep dive to 35 degree water.

Second, the neoprene neck seal didn't seem to fit me too well. I was pretty wet when I got out. Craig, the shop manager, had a similar experience with the same kind of suit a few weeks ago. I'm going to go with latex seals on mine. When I got out of the suit I was soaked. Some of it was sweat, but I'm betting that most of it was pool water.

With the classroom and pool session behind me, I get to try it for real in a couple of weeks when we do the training dives. We'll be combining the dives with the Deep Diver specialty dives. Regardless of how bad I am in the dry suit, I'll be glad to have it on for the deep dives in the quarry. Brrrr...

It's hard to believe that the weather is still this warm in October, but I'm not complaining. In fact, I'm quite happy that it was so warm this weekend.

This weekend we did the certification dives for the PADI Search and Recovery specialty. As I told the instructor, with each class I take, I'm having more fun than the class before. This one was a smallish class of five. The course is basically learning techniques for finding objects lost underwater and bringing them to the surface.

The interesting thing for me was that everyone in the class other than me is on the underwater search and recovery team for the county. Of course the techniques they use are completely different, especially since most of their "dives" are in water less than 20 feet deep. For the deeper ones, they use cool toys like side scan sonar to narrow down the search area to, oh, about 10 square feet. They're all police officers with various departments in the county, so they recover things like stolen cars and murder weapons. A lot more meaningful than a lost fin or mask that the PADI Search and Recovery is geared towards. And certainly more interesting than the bottles of sand we used for our training dives.

The weekend started off with a descent to a training platform to be tested on tying knots. Specifically the bowline, sheetbend, and two half-hitches. I had spent about 45 minutes before the dive practicing the knots, so I didn't have any trouble (just don't ask me to tie them today!). Then we broke into teams and practiced the circular search and U-pattern search. Since there were five people, I was team number three with one of the members of the first team to return from each skill test. So I ended up diving with several different people throughout the weekend. For the U-pattern we had a larger object that we used a lift bag to raise. Unfortunately, the object wasn't big enough for the bag we used, so the dump valve didn't work right, but it was just practice anyway.

The second dive of the day was the semi-circular search pattern. We had a lot of trouble on this one. We never found our bottle. It turned out that it had rolled under some tall grass that was growing around a dentist chair. Even the instructor had trouble finding it and he's the one who put it there, so I don't feel too bad about missing it.

The last dive of the day was the jack stay pattern. For this you position a rope across the search area at one end. The two divers swim along the rope, one on each side until they reach the other side. Then they move the rope toward the unsearched area, and do it again. Eventually you cover the entire area. For this search there was only one object that each team had to find (instead of one object for each team). No one found it. We were all two for four, with each team missing an object from one of the previous searches. Maybe we would have better luck tomorrow.

Sunday started off with an expanding square search pattern and a snorkeler led search. By this point we had searched for the little bottles filled with sand three different times. I think we were all sick of them. At least with the snorkeler led search was to a larger object that we used the lift bag to raise. This time the object was big enough that we got to actually use the bag properly.

Our final task for the day was to find an object the instructor had planted the day before in a large area of the quarry. We performed the interview questions to locate the general location of the object (a flat plastic weight about 12" x 24" with about 20 pounds of scuba weights attached with a weight belt. Since the plate is black and the weights are grey, it should blend in quite nicely with the quarry rocks.

We decided that since it was such a large area that maybe a snorkeler led search would work. Except no one wanted to be the snorkeler. We came up with the idea to do the snorkeler led search with the "snorkeler" swimming under water and being one of the searchers. This proved to be a huge mess. On the second pass we got off in the wrong direction and ended up where we started from. One of the guys was low on air, so we went to the surface to regroup.

After a tank change, we split into two teams to do U-pattern searches from opposite sides of the search area working towards each other. My team was three people and I played navigator while the other two swam on either side of me. We had just started our third leg when we found it shoved down between some rocks. We tied it on to the lift bag and took it to the surface to end the dive. Our instructor, who had been monitoring on the surface, came down when we stopped to make sure we had found it (since he had forgotten exactly where he had put it) and then went to gather the other team.

Afterwards we sat and joked about our mistakes and how clumsy the guy with the plastic bottles full of sand was. My wife and her cousin had come up to dive on Saturday and had found the bottle that none of us could find, so our instructor gave us a hard time about how two newbie divers found it just swimming along and we couldn't (he and I actually recovered later that day on a for-fun dive). Some of the other guys are going to be doing the deep and dry suit specialties with me next weekend, so we planned out the food for that trip. Basically, this was probably the most fun I've had on any dive weekend this year. If the trend continues, next week will be a blast.

So that's three specialties. Two more and 15 more logged dives and I can go for Master Scuba Diver. I'll get the two specialties and half of the dives next weekend. So I need to find a couple more Saturdays to get the rest before it gets too cold.

This was an intense weekend of diving: nine dives in two days...

The purpose of the weekend was to the certification dives for the dry suit and deep specialties. We did the dry suit dives first to make the deep dives easier. Being that it was the last certification weekend for the shop, there were a lot of different classes going on. There were five or six Open Water students, six or so Advanced Open Water students, three or four Rescue Diver students, and then us. There were four of us doing the dry suit specialty and three of the four, plus one other, doing the deep specialty.

Unfortnately, I ordered a dry suit a couple of weeks ago, but it wasn't in yet, so I was using a rental. Fortunately it was a trilaminate with latex seals and separate boots just like the one I ordered, so the practice will directly translate to mine. I'm getting a Bare and the rental was a DUI, but they aren't that different. One thing I noticed was that the exhaust valve leaked when I didn't have enough air in the suit, and the wrist seals leaked a little bit. Hopefully mine will be a little better.

Doc (our instructor) was teaching us and the Rescue students. He started with our dry suit dives which allowed us to do some more practice dives while he worked with his Rescue class. The first dive was just a skills dive. We practiced buoyancy using both the dry suit and the BCD and recover from a runaway ascent. The runaway ascent drill was fun: the instructor put us on our heads, filled up our dry suits with air and let us go. We had to turn ourselves right side up and dump the air from the suit to arrest the ascent. If you get yourself right side up quick enough, it's pretty easy, but if you don't, I would expect that it's a little more difficult. The second dive was just a tour of the quarry, or at least one corner of it. It was my first trip to Gilboa in four years, so it was a little more interesting than Blue Springs where I've done most of my diving this year.

After our two dives, we went to help the rescue class. For one dive I played the lost diver. For another, I was the diver who lost my buddy. I played it up pretty big: signs of panic, not inflating my BCD when I got to the surface, throwing off my mask and regulator, wildly looking for my "lost" buddy. It was fun. Not as fun was when they found me in the previous dive. The rescue students managed to dunk my head under water multiple times while simulating rescue breathing and removing my equipment. I suppose it's payback since I'm sure I did the same to the "victims" when I did the rescue class last month.

We took a lunch break and then headed to the deep side of the quarry for the first of our deep dives. I decided that this would be a good opportunity to do my first Nitrox dive. The plan was to go to the deep platform at 70 feet and do some skills. Instead of the usual timed puzzle drills, Doc had us record our depth and tank pressure on our slates every five minutes in preparing for the transition to tech course that some of us are going to get into.

This was my first trip to the deep end of the Gilboa quarry. The visibility on that side of the quarry is a lot better than the rest of the quarry. The wall on the deep side goes straight from the surface to the bottom at 120 feet. We descended next to one of the descent line to the platform and I was immediately amazed by the view. I had never been deep in a quarry before where you could see more than 20 feet. The whole thing was very eerie. It hardly seemed real. I took my camera with me for the trip, but I didn't take it on that dive because I figured we would be working. As it turns out, the first deep dive was the only one that I would have had time to take pictures, so I'll have to catch the view on a different trip.

The surface temperature wasn't too bad, maybe 68 degrees, but by the time we got to 70 feet, it was a little chilly. Even in a dry suit, it was cool. The second thermocline was very definite and you felt it immediately. This being my first day in a dry suit (other than the pool session we had earlier in the month) didn't help matters. It took me until our third deep dive before I realized that the majority of my suit squeeze was being caused because I wasn't closing my exhaust valve until I got to the bottom. So, as I was descending, I would add air to my dry suit and it would just start bubbling out. I didn't realize this immediately since the exhaust valve is pretty slow, so I just assumed that as I was descending I needed to add more air because of pressure. Oops.

We got to the platform and Doc did a quick check of everyone just to make sure there were no problems. The plan was to sit on the 70 foot platform for a few minutes and then swim along the wall at 70 feet, but Doc changed his mind after he checked with everyone. He decided we were all too calm, I guess, so he started off, with the group in trail, and descended to the top of the trailer sitting at bottom next to the wall. The top of the trailer is at 110 feet or so. Now the water was really cold.

We didn't stick around too long. Since we had all been diving all day, we all had pretty good nitrogen levels, even with using EAN-32 for this dive. And even though we were well within the no-deco limits, a "safety stop" was not just a good idea, it was virtually mandatory. Still, it was an easy dive and probably the most interesting dive I've had in a quarry.

That night the Advanced Open Water class was doing a night dive, so we tagged along. There were a bunch of divers, so we split up into three groups. The group I went with planned to make it a deep dive too. We went to the tubes at 65 feet or so. It was a nice long dive and we covered most of the shallow end of the quarry. Before the dive, I was talking with Tom, one of the divemasters, and he mentioned that I should try turning out my light and swim along by the light of the other 20 divers. So after we started up from the deepest part of the dive, I fell to the back of the pack and turned out my light. I should have been paying attention because there were divers everywhere. I didn't know which group was mine, at first. I got situated and settled in. It really was pretty cool, but you have to be careful. There's a lot of stuff to bang your head on. I was close enough to the group that their flashlights allowed me to see the obstacles. Actually, without my light on, I could see more, although nothing as clearly as with my own light. It was an interesting experience.

The next day was all about deep diving. Our first two dives were to the bottom at 120 feet. Again, Doc had us record our depth and tank pressure every five minutes. For, the second dive of the day, we were to go to the bottom, and then swim on a 270 degree bearing until we reached a limit, either a third of our gas or our no-deco time. This, again, was an excercise to move toward tech training.

In traditional recreational diving, you would plan your dive to stay within your no-deco limits and end the dive when you reach that limit (or when you are down to 500 PSI). In technical diving, or more correctly any dive where you can't ascend directly to the surface due to an overhead environment or a decompression obligation, you do things a little differently. One difference is that you look at the dive in halves and you gas in thirds. You use no more than one third of your gas for the first half of the dive, one third for the second half, and are left with one third to share with your dive buddy should he have a problem. The first half of your dive is your descent and trip away from the descent point. When you reach your turn point (either by location, gas limit, or time limit) you turn back to your exit point. The trip back is the second half of the dive. Presumably you will use another third of your gas in the second half. In a worst case scenario, your dive buddy has an OOA situation at the turn point, so you have your last third of gas to donate to your buddy.

So for our second dive of the day, we focused on the rule of thirds. My buddy was Bob, one of the shop divemasters. He was working on his deep certification too, but he is more experienced than I am and has a little bit better air consumption rate than I do. We were both diving with LP95s, so I reached the turn limit first. It was at a checkpoint as well, so we recorded our depth and pressures, then signaled "up". In this scenario, "up" didn't mean "ascend", but rather turn back, simulating an overhead environment. By the time we reached our ascent point, I was within one minute of the NDL, so it worked out perfect.

For our "safety stops" on the deep dives we practiced breathing from a stage bottle hung at 15 feet. Our "safety stops" were "simulating" a 5 minute, 15 foot decompression stop. (That's recreational phraseology. Technically a "safety stop" is a decompression stop. Most certification agencies use the term "safety stop" because recreational divers aren't supposed to be doing decompression diving. Even though a three minute "safety stop" at 15 feet is a decompression stop, they just don't call it that. Since these dives were for a recreational deep dive specialty, I'll call them "safety stops".) Basically, these dives were the first dives in the transition to tech course, so we did everything from a technical diving view while staying within the recreational limits.

The last dive of the day was to practice following a decompression runtime schedule. We started at the 70 foot platform for five minutes. Then we ascended to 40 feet at a slow 15 ft/min rate (noting the 55 foot mark at one minute into the ascent). We then stayed at 40 feet for four minutes. We had additional four minute stops at 30 feet and 20 feet and a five minute stop at 15 feet. We did these stops without an ascent line to practice midwater buoyancy. I did OK until the 15 foot stop. At one point I floated up a little too far and I couldn't dump my dry suit fast enough, so I ended up at 6 feet before I got control, but other than that, it wasn't too bad. I stayed within +5/-3 feet of the assigned depth. Given that I'm still new at the dry suit and I can't control the buoyancy as naturally as I can with just my BCD.

Throughout the weekend Doc would randomly signal "out of air" to someone to see how fast they got their backup regulator to him. I was the last one, so by the time he got to me, I was ready for it. He got me on the last dive at the 15 foot stop. I had just finished my gas switch demonstration and was watching Bob do his demo when Doc came up from behind me and signaled "out of air". Without looking, I was able to pull my octo from its clip and get it to him in less than two seconds from his signal. A lot better than in the pool when he gave me the out of air signal and I was trying to figure what he was asking me to demonstrate: "Does he want me to demonstrate an out of air situation? Does that signal have some special meaning for the dry suit?" After he pulled his regulator out of his mouth and gave the signal again, I figured out what he was doing, but I was still confused: "why would we be practicing that?" It turns out that Doc likes you to practice out of air drills frequently. Which make sense. Without air, your options are pretty limited. If you have air, you can work out most other problems. So you need to be prepared to donate air to your buddy at the drop of a hat without even thinking about it. I wonder what would happen if I turned the tables on him and signaled to him that I was out of air? Would he be as quick to donate? (-:

All in all this was a great weekend. I learned a lot and feel relatively comfortable in the dry suit. The short intro to technical diving was interesting. I'm looking forward to starting the transition course. I enjoyed diving with Doc. He's easy to get along with, but he's right on top of you if you screw up. I think he's going to be a good instructor.

Oh, and I'm never going to dive in a full wet suit again. If it's too cold for a shorty, I'm diving dry. Actually, I won't get that luxury. I'm going to start the Divemaster course next February and you can't teach Open Water students in a dry suit. Well, you could, but it's better if you are using the same equipment as your students. So I guess I can't throw away my wet suit just yet.

I told someone a couple of weeks ago that I have more fun at each certification dive weekend than I did the weekend before, and this weekend was no exception. My only disappointment is that this may be the last dive of the year. Maybe when my dry suit comes in, I'll see if I can get out one more time...