Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Whytecliff Stage Bottle Checkout Dive 02/11/2010

Part two of my stage bottle checkout dive. And this time it was more successful.

Finally after many delays and reschedules, we made it out to finish this off. I almost had to cancel again as the alarm at work went off, and I was called to go investigate. There were no problems, and everything was fine, but it made me late. Thankfully Alan agreed to still do the dive. He joked that I owed him 15 minutes of his life. I figured some beer would be adequate.

It was dark now by the time we got geared up and into the water. No more "night" dives like the ones in summer! This would make it a bit more challenging, but not bad since Whytecliff was well known to us, and night dives were fairly routine now.

Our dive plan was to deploy our stages, then run out the gas to about half at 30 feet while looking around, then shoot a surface marker and send the positive bottles to the surface.

I was leading the dive and took us down to 30 feet. I went down to 40 feet without noticing quick enough, but got us back on track. I followed the bottom contour from there, just practicing propulsion and navigation. Near the start of the dive, Alan unclipped the tail of my stage bottle and my SPG. I didn't notice for 20 minutes! That reinforced the good practice of a complete flow check and pat down. I was doing the flow checks, but didn't also check the rest of my gear. When I finally noticed, I was able to clip everything back off alright. However, I stopped the dive to do that, and Alan later said that you should not need to stop the dive to clean up gear like that. Only if there was a big problem.

We came across three stubby squid on the dive, along with a seal that kept buzzing us several times. The squid were small, maybe 3 inches, but very cool. I'd not seen squid before. One of them inked Alan when he was looking at it. They were fast, too! The seal never really came very close, but zipped around in the edges of our light beams using it to help him catch stuff.

Alan pulled an out of gas situation after the squid and it went ok. I got him my stage regulator and switched to my secondary. But I didn't go onto my primary, so he simulated out of gas again. The idea being that the stages would be usually quite low, and it may have been used up. I learned a valuable lesson in that once you got your buddy onto a known gas source, get off your secondary and onto your primary just in case you need to donate that. I was able to stow the stage and clean up my gear alright after this drill. So my practice had paid off.

After that situation, I shot the surface marker and we went to send the bottles up. Alan clipped his to the line and pushed it up. A few seconds later it rocketed back down. I laughed pretty hard, the stages were not positive enough, as we'd not used enough gas. Oh well! We weren't able to do that particular skill to completion. I'd have to practice it later.

Finally we did the normal staged ascent following the line up. However, Alan did yet another out of gas situation, this time I had my spool in one hand and my light. I hadn't clipped the line off to the spool properly and Alan wanted to see if I'd drop it. I was able to get things handled ok, but did touch off the bottom one time. Then we shared air up to the surface.

At the end of the dive, he had a lot of valuable feedback. I did ok, but still there were fundamental problems, even after 200 dives. My frog kick was still not very good at all, and my trim was off by about 30 degrees. At the end of the dive Alan said trim got much better, with it being 0 degrees at the end. But again it's something I had to keep working on.

He gave a valuable tip about inward / outward awareness and skill. During the dive, the idea was to do a thorough check every 5 minutes. I had been focusing on equipment, but even then I still wasn't checking everything. Case in point doing a dive for 20 minutes with an unclipped stage bottle and SPG! The best way to do it was to do an internal check first covering yourself, how you were feeling, etc. Then move to a full check of your gear, valves, depth, time, gas supply, a full pat down to identify anything lose. Then to check your buddy; were they showing any stress, strange motions, bubbles etc. Building situational awareness was hard, but this would help a lot. Once the inward and equipment was second nature, the external stuff would come too. So in the end the goal is to have a complete mental picture of the dive at any time, and be able to anticipate problems before they occur. So something to work on for sure!

As a big, and pleasant surprise, Heather had come out to see how we were doing. I saw a glow stick on the rocks by the bay after we surfaced and wondered who it was. Then when we were going down to the beach to get our stages in the dark, that same glow stick went by. It was two people, but I had no idea that it was her. Then in the parking lot, her friend Karen came up behind me and asked if I was Anton. I had no idea how this person knew I was there! So it was a pretty funny situation after I figured out she was behind it.

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