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.
