Underwater Exploration

Ok, I need to really make this blog glow since Rob will read it and haze me until no end on the next class that I take from him.

In preparation for the second half of my Fundamentals class I spent the week consuming copious amounts of caffeine, analyzing the kicks in the 5thd-x Essentials video, working on my study handouts, and laying down on the ground working on kick techniques trying to build muscle memory to keep my knees up. I really wanted to get some pool time in, but unfortunately with my work schedule it didn’t work out.

So the weekend finally comes and I meet up with my instructor, Rob, and class teammates at their hotel at 8AM before going to the infamous Rock Lake. It’s infamous if you are a diver in the region anyways. This was to be my first dives in Rock Lake and as much as I wanted to dive there, I wanted to do the class in the local watering hole that I was used to, or so I thought. As it turned out the local watering hole was packed full of open water classes, visibility was shot, and resembled a large can of sardines from what I’m told. So I was more gracious to be diving in Rock Lake after the fact and it didn’t take long to get used to the small area of Rock Lake that we were exposed to.

The dives were packed full of skill drills and emergency skills. Each dive Rob gave us more long hose to hang each other with and became somewhat more complex. Over all, I felt that my teammates and I worked well together as a team, especially for not ever diving together other than in the pool the weekend before. One of the biggest benefits that I got out of this class was how the emergency drills (such as OOG and unconscious diver recovery) were conducted when you least expected them to happen. You really had to keep your awareness sharp so that you would notice the emergency and then react appropriately to it.

We definitely had some blooper moments during the class. Mine was while doing the primary light stow and reserve light deploy. I stowed my primary light, but left it turned on. So after I was working through the procedures to stow my backup light I was pointing the light against my hand to see if it was off, but my hand kept being illuminated by my primary light. After about three full turns of my backup light I finally realized what was happening and turned my primary light off. Rob said afterwards that he thought he was going to get to see three C cell batteries fall out the front of my backup light. It was definitely one of those brain-fart moments that were caught on film. Another blooper moment actually came from one of my teammates while trying to do a valve drill with a single tank. He had been struggling through out the dives trying to manipulate the valve, but could not reach it until the last dive. He managed to turn the valve completely off and then crack it open slightly, but then lost his grip on the valve. It was definitely a serious situation when it was happening, but we all had a pretty good laugh over it after the fact.

After our last dive of the day I was somewhat disappointed in myself. I didn’t feel that my buoyancy and trim were where I wanted them to be and was telling Rob that I was just going to give myself a provisional rating. So it was surprising to me to have Rob tell me that he felt that my skills were within the standards and that he was going to pass me (tech pass). I almost had to look at my watch to make sure it wasn’t April Fools Day. My teammates both received a provisional status and I’m sure that they will nail their update dive(s) with Rob in the future. They were excellent divers and all around great guys and I would definitely dive with them again.

Overall, This has been the best investment in scuba diving that I have made. I was very impressed with the GUE standards, the class, and Rob as an Instructor. I feel that my technique has improved and that I am overall a safer diver, which is my ultimate goal as a diver.

As stated, this is part 2. The first blog can be read here.

So I finally signed up for a GUE Fundamentals class and have been excited about taking the class for sometime. After a few months of reviewing schedules, my budget, and emailing instructors; I finally settle with Rob Calkins from Flatirons Scuba near the Denver, CO area.

Rob and I email each other back and forth discussing the class schedule and so forth. Originally the class was going to be over two weekends on March 10-11 and March 17-18. The first weekend was to be at Robs shop for lecture, field drills, and pool work. Then I get an email from Rob asking when I was flying in because he just got the new teaching material and it covers information in greater detail then it did before and he wanted to get a head start by holding a lecture on March 9th. So I email him back stating that I am actually driving and that it should only take around 7 hours to drive. A few days later I get an email to myself and the other students taking the class saying that we would have lecture on March 9th from 6-9PM. Not a big deal, since I was actually going to start driving that Friday morning.

So Friday, March 9, I started my journey to the Rocky Mountains at around 8AM. After around six and a half hours/420 miles of driving, I made it to the hotel that I was going to be staying at. I actually really enjoyed the drive. It’s always cool to watch the changing geological features as your driving. For my drive it went from flat plains, to rolling hills, to extinct volcanic uprisings, to the first sight of the Rocky Mountains just before Rotan, NM. It was really cool to see the snow covered mountains as the western backdrop of my driving.

Once I got checked into the hotel, I went to my room and unwound from the days driving and just laid in bed for an hour or so. After that I went through and unpacked my things and turned on my laptop to check email. Sure enough, the class hadn’t even started yet and Rob had sent me an email with a PDF document asking me to print it off and review it before class. The class hadn’t even started yet and I already had homework! Thankfully it is a subject that I’m already fairly familiar with, Nitrox. I skimmed through the document quickly, without printing it out, since I didn’t have access to a printer and jotted some notes down in my notebook before the class. The next thing you know it’s time for me to start heading towards the shop for the first few hours of lecture.

The first night of lecture was pretty leisurely. We pretty much did a meet and greet and dove right into to the lecture, which basically covered how GUE came about, why GUE is doing what it is doing, why the fundamentals course, among other subjects. The lecture lasted a little longer than expected and Rob gave us even more homework. EEK! I’ve read many of these Fundamental reports before, but nobody ever mentioned homework. I was already half drained from diving most of the day, so I decided to just go to bed when I get back to the hotel and wake up early to get a start on the homework. The homework were basically some handouts dealing with deep stops, partial pressures, gas management, surface consumption rate, and determining thirds with dissimilar tanks.

So the next morning, I wake up early and do the normal morning routine: shower, get dressed, and eat breakfast. I then start working on the homework to only get through a few out the handouts before having to head to class. Thankfully, Rob informs us that the handouts don’t have to be done until we meet next weekend! Wahoo. After about four hours of mind numbing lecture on gear configuration, buoyancy, trim, propulsion techniques, and the basic five we break for a short lunch and gather our things to head to the pool. For the past month or so I have been dreading the swim test, because of my bad memory of the swim test in my Divemaster class. Thankfully though I did the 300yard swim in 6 minutes and 27 seconds. I was quiet proud of that time even though the altitude kicked my butt during the swim. I found the 50-foot breath hold to be quiet easy and popped up right next to where the Rob was standing to have him look at me and say, “OK”. Next Rob got to have his fun with us as he demonstrated different propulsion techniques and then wanted us to practice them as he filmed us. From the very start Rob emphasized a unified team and told us to practice the kicks as a team by swimming around together. He told us that it would be wise to not solo dive or that “bad things will happen.” Everybody in the team had their strong points and their weak points. As a team, Rob said that we functioned well together, which is a real compliment as I have never dove with anybody else in the class. The other two students know each other, since they work in the same shop, but how often they dive together is beyond my knowledge. My weak points are that my knee’s drop when I’m asked to perform certain kicks and I don’t get the ankle action that I should be getting for other kicks. Also, my situational awareness goes out the window when I’m asked to perform tasks, such as the basic five. When performing the basic five, I not only blinded Rob with my primary light, but I ran him into a wall. Rob pointed out the light to me pretty quickly and I gained enough awareness to try to keep my light pointed down when performing the basic five, but I didn’t even notice that I was charging Rob until he was already pinned to the wall, at which point I attempted to do a backwards kick.

After a few hours in the pool we got out and went back to the shop for a video debrief. The video is very unforgiving. You never think you are doing certain movements until you see yourself on the television. At some points during the video I thought my legs were having convulsions that I wasn’t aware of. It was actually me doing a modified flutter kick, which worked, but at the same time wasn’t efficient because my feet were to tense. I knees dropped when doing a proper flutter kick and my left leg hangs a little lower than my right. All in all it was very humbling and a great learning experience to see me doing things that I was oblivious to. While watching a little bit of video we decided that we needed to drown our sorrows in a little bit of keg beer, conveniently provided by the shop from a spring party. We showed our team building skills by having one person pump the keg, one person operate the spout, and the other person hold the cups. Then we promptly returned to analyze the video a little longer before calling it a night and getting ready for the next day.

Sunday came way to soon for me. The whole daylight savings time kicked my butt since I’m used to Central Standard Time (CST) and Colorado is in Mountain Standard Time (MST), which means that I didn’t just lose one hour of sleep, I lost two! I woke up all groggy eyed and did my morning ritual of getting ready for the day and headed for the shop. After a short discussion on the previous pool session, we decided that we would prefer to have some more pool time. Rob liked the idea and we decided to follow a similar schedule as Saturday. So again, we dove right into lecture, and this time getting into some more complicated subjects such as gas planning, logistics, decompression, physiology, etc that prompted me to take numerous notes, which held up the class some what. I was actually impressed at the detail that the class went into as some of the course material is actually material that you would expect to see in a technical class. I learned quiet a bit over this lecture and we ended up finishing the presentation after a few hours. We then made some adjustments to equipment that needed to be made, did some field drills, and headed back to the pool to have some more humble pie in-front of the camera. We actually looked much better, but still had things to work on. Rob for the most part just let us do our own thing, since this really wasn’t a planned pool session and just filmed us as we practiced the skills learned so far. After a couple hours in the pool we headed back to the shop for more film reviews, while not perfect, was allot better than the previous day in the pool. We then discussed the plan for next week and broke for the weekend.

As the title says, this is only part 1 of 2. Next weekend, March 17, we will be meeting up for our open water portion of the class. I would really like to get some pool dives done this week, but I won’t be able to with my work schedule. Hopefully though, I will be able to do some field drills and work on keeping my knees up while performing kicks. So far this has been an excellent class and I don’t see it getting worse anytime soon. We’ll see how the next dives go…