Dives cancelled today. Too much chop and visibility what shite, we could see how crappy the conditions were from the boat, didn’t even bother getting wet.
The saga towards Advanced Open Water continues tomorrow…hopefully.
Sorry I have nothing cool to report.
Ok glad it was a joke 
Honestly it would amaze me half of my group every day was afraid of sharks !
My common replies were close your eyes
Or the old you have twice the chance of being struck by lightning
One day two guys busted out laughing at that ? Asked why he said I have been struck twice while playing golf !
Reply awesome we are going to see a guy get attacked by a shark this dive folks or maybe on the 2nd dive
Yeah lifting things moving things a tool can be handy
Not sure why he used that to lift a conch ?
Even for ling spined urchin we just used our hands carefully
For me the watch I had tags and casios and times and the citizen was nice forgot model now ? But one of their dive ones so again basic backup on it depth timers and such plus knowing the time is handy when working since boats leave spots at certain times etc… Working with tides and such a watch is important to me at least
I never wore it off work much though ? Snagging and such as you say
My wetsuit kinda covered my watch most the time
Story
Two guys go out free diving they hear a strange smashing sound one guy says its freaky the other guy wants to see
So one swims in one swims toward it he gets about 70 feet and sees a tiger shark thrashing about and half a large turtle !
Almost instantly the shark was on him he thought enough to straighten up and not put his hands out the shark hit him mid section and pushed him back the guy managed to put his hands in the sharks nose shark goes back to turtle the guynpulls out his pear fishing knife starts swimming backwards watching the shark out of the blue the shark comes flying he does the same thing he straightens up and manages to hit the shark in the eye ! Shark takes off
Pretty wild and lucky
The base med kit and some tincture is a huge thing and cheap to make it can be in a tiny pelican type case but worth having keep the large sewing needles like sail repair size and the nylon thread in your med kit as a start also extra zip ties all my flashlight or any accessory like wreck reel etc… so all clips clips were held on with a couple zip ties for the reason you can quickly cut through a zip tie if your light or whatever gets hung up on something chances are you can pull hard enough to rip free if it was some solid stainless ring it could be life threatening !
I took my advanced open water 22 years ago. It was awsome but a small helpful piece of advice.
To make a long story short, do not get drunk as hell tonight. You will enjoy tommorow so much more.
Be safe and have a blast…
That’s what NITROX is for 
Hahahahaha! Wish I would have known back then. My mouth was so dry, I coughed(not a great idea underwater). Dry air reg, early ninties, i had no idea. Lost my regulator at 40’ and tapped my SSI instructor on the shoulder and pointed up. He tried to grab me but I have very strong legs. When we got to the surface he asked am I ok. As I’m lung puking water, I thumbsed up him, and he said did I hit my bc? No I said, I was drowning and that was incentive enough.
It took half a bag of peppermint, but my throat finally chilled and all was well.
Moral of the story was the short version, don’t get shitfaced because your dive got cancelled and expect a happy ending(unless in Vegas, maybe). The next day was so much sweeter, without the bars and strip joints.
Wow, never thought I would say or think that, but diving is a different animal.
Life of most dive instructors is ironic considering agencies say
After a dive avoid strenuous activities, sex, hot tubs, drinking etc…
After bounce diving to set moorings and then has to clean the boat schlep all the tanks fix clean all gear
He then goes back out diving to get some fish cleans em throw on bbq grab a drink or ten and go chill in the hot tub often hooking up with the new tourist hottie gets up the next morning and does it all again !
Damn Honu, should have had you as DI. Sounds much better than mine.
Keep safe…
Hahaha we had good classes !
Huge bbq pretty much every night fresh fish and lobster and other folks would bring down everything else including fresh deer meat sometimes and chuckers and pheasant some of the wives would bring down cakes and such beer chips etc…
Fun times
Now your just making me jealous…
I might think of recert if if is still like that, lol
Slightly off-topic but best hangover cure is IV LR and 100% O2 in a chamber, topped by ibuprofen. Thanks Uncle Sam!
This thread makes me miss recreational diving. I may have to get back at it.
I miss Utila in some ways the whole island is about diving
Having a good time going dancing at night hanging out with buddies good food good diving
Maui was a mix but a lot of it all revolves around the ocean surfing diving fishing etc… And those kinda places just seem so much happier about life
When you live on a island with no chamber you just go diving and hope for the best
Never been in a chamber would be fun
Well almost done with advanced. Finally got to dive again.
Did Underwater Nav and Peak Performance Buoyancy. Nav was stupid easy. Not sure why it’s included as a required dive when Peak Performance Buoyancy is far more useful in my mind. Anyway, it took all of 3 minutes to do the Nav evolutions then the rest of the dive. Not really much new on this one but did see a seahorse finally.
Peak Performance Buoyancy kicked my ass. My buoyancy is pretty good when I’m diving, even my instructors have commented on how good it is for such a new diver. However, the finite control is effing difficult!!! Part of the problem was my legs are more negatively buoyant so while I could do the buddha and the vertical positioning without any trouble, doing the horizontal positioning 6" off the deck just wasn’t happening. I tried it probably 4 or 5 times and I’d do fine for 15 seconds then my feet would sink.
We did some other evolutions, swimming through progressively smaller boxes. My buoyancy was fine for those but I kept forgetting that my tank adds a foot above me. I could easily maintain my distance off the bottom, but that distance was too high the first couple times. Adding weights to my hand wasn’t difficult, typical add air to BCD stuff.
Overall it was fun, felt good to be back in the water. I think PPB would have been easier if I had been able to dive the past few days.
Tomorrow I do Deep and Multilevel, both with Nitrox. PADI lets you do Nitrox in conjunction with any of the adventure dives so I can kill two birds with one stone. Analyzed and signed for my tanks today before I left. I’m sort of disappointed I didn’t get to do Deep on air, as I feel I should probably get narc’d at least once so I know how it feels. While the book says there’s no difference between air and EANx, the instructors seem to feel like there’s definitely a lower possibility on EANx than air. Guess we’ll find out tomorrow.
Nitrox is not for deep diving really
It can be used but partial pressures of more oxygen can get you into more trouble for oxygen toxicity since rec limits EAN is safe though
For fun since seems you are eager to learn
Read up on partial pressures and oxygen toxicity
Going deep over 200 is just something to do unless you are trying to see certain things like wrecks
Narcosis is not always halted by diving EAN mixes but I do think its less chance upside I like the feeling of not being quite as tired often more refreshed after nitrox diving
Again for me only been narced once in around 10,000 dives
So don’t worry if it is going to happen it will its not like 100 feet all get narced
Chances you are hooked on diving so it might happen in the future
Its more a extended bottom time mid to shallow diving mix that does allow you to feel a bit less tired
Calculated max for our EANx32 is 33.9 meters so the “Deep” is really only going to be to 30m in order to prevent O2 toxicity. This is based off of 1.4 ata PO2 with 1.6 ata contingency so I doubt we’ll get close to true max depth.
I’m excited more for the “less tired” aspect than anything. I’m certainly not exerting myself, but I do feel drained sometimes back at the shop so I’m interested to see the difference at the end of the day. The extended bottom time on the multilevel will be nice though. The shop also showed me and walked me through their whole fill station and their procedure so that was cool. Analysis was dead nuts on 32%, I’m convinced it’s that teutonic attention to detail from these guys.
I think if I ever have a desire to go deeper or dive wrecks I think I’ll end up doing tec rec first. The idea of “touch-and-go” or stretching the no deco limits appeal to me less than spending the time to be well within safety limits. Maybe after I have more dives I’ll feel differently, but right now I want to dive as conservatively as possible while still having fun.
Yeah no worries as they say its for rec diving safe diving
But often they mistake the idea its for deep when its not really
When it started being popular a few cases of folks thinking they could go over 150 and thought it was for deep ?
For me its a extend bottom time feel better gas
Finished my Advanced today. Was a lot of fun going deep. I guessed the tomato on the second guess. It was pretty amazing how little color there is at 30m. EANx32 for both dives with 1.4 bar PO2. We played with an egg yolk and did the bottle crushed at 30m, almost bursting after filling with air on the bottom and taking it to the surface.
The second dive we ended a little early. A couple joined the instructor and I for the dives, she was feeling a little sea sick before the first one, and the second one I guess she wasn’t feeling well either. She ended up being cold at about 12m (second was the “Multilevel” even though we’ve been diving a multilevel profile since day 1) so we safety stopped and surfaced. I think she should have called the dive before she got in but I’m sort of a HTFU kind of guy, so if it’s that bad you need to abort from the get go. Didn’t lose too much bottom time but it would have been nice to have stayed down for another 15 minutes. Jerk. Her husband was apologetic though, even if he had shit buoyancy and was all over the place.
Dive slate came in handy. Even though I was diving with a computer I wrote max and contingency depth for 1.4 and 1.6 bar in big letters just to be extra careful. When the chick couldn’t figure out how to use her computer and the instructor had to mess with it a little bit having the wrist slate for more complex communications was very nice, although I did have to sit there for a minute with my arm stuck out while they wrote back and forth. It was sort of cool to see the change in buoyancy at depth since I was using the velcro strap and as we descended it kept getting looser as the wetsuit compressed. I swapped the strap out for two bungees already. Having it on my wrist was a lot nicer than having it hanging down or stuck in a pocket, even though the surface is smaller I liked the utility better than the clipboard style I had carried on a previous dive.
Anyway, here are some pics. I wish I had one of the shrimp cleaning out the moray’s mouth. It was neat to see symbiosis at work.
and last, dead on the surface.
So you’re hooked
Had my first real issue yesterday as a diver, and I’m happy to say that I did the right thing, even though part of the solution was incorrect…
A co-worker happened to be in a neighboring town, so I got a hold of her via the BookFace to see if she wanted to grab lunch or something. As it turns out she has her OW ticket so she decided to spend a day in the water.
I’ll start off saying the second dive was fine. Despite her dicking with her BCD the whole time because she was using it for her buoyancy instead of her lungs, it was fine and she had fun. The first dive though, was another story.
So we descend as normal after I basically did a quick refresher of the whole open water procedures with her. She seemed to remember ok. However, that’s pretty much where the good stuff ends. She suited up ok and the entry was fine, although it seemed like she was having some equalization problems to begin with. She sorted those quickly with a little reminder from me.
Visibility was pretty shitty during the first dive and it was pretty much the leading cause of our problems. She’s also tiny, like 5’1" 85lbs. She had the smallest gear the dive shop had and it was still a little big on her. She’s also kind of a hippy dippy type from Vermont, and doesn’t just stop to smell the flowers, she stops to smell every single flower. Well apparently it’s the same with fish as she was barely swimming, and very shortly the group started to spread out. I tried coaxing her as best as I could underwater, but she just didn’t equate the flighty behavior with causing a potentially dangerous situation. We drifted a bit deeper, but still within sight of the group, and when she went to equalize, she pinched her nose wrong and the mask flooded. Well then it all went downhill. She started to panic a little but I was able to grab her and pull her to me and maintain our position in the water as she was starting to kick and scull and tried to inflate her BCD and generally made a mess of things. Because of all this, visibility dropped to nothing. I got her calm and worked through clearing her mask, establishing something close to neutral buoyancy, and getting her back to regular breathing again. The problem is that now we were lost. We weren’t too deep, only 16m of water, but couldn’t see crap, and I got all turned around trying to get her to calm down and fix her issues. We swam in the general direction a little bit to see if we could see bubbles or get out of the cloud of crap now floating, but 5m of visibility just wasn’t enough. I signaled to go up, and after a second for the realization that we were lost sunk in, we started up. I kept having to pull her down as she was trying to swim straight to the surface. She finally realized that we needed to slow down.
Now, here’s where I screwed up. We searched for a minute then headed up, my computer started yelling at me to make a safety stop. So we did. I had to hold her at 5m while my damn computer counted down, and then we surfaced. I realized after my head broke we should have ascended right away. We were probably 15 or 20 meters from the rest of the group. On a normal day it would have been more than enough to see where they were. The guide wasn’t thrilled that we got lost, and he wasn’t happy that it took so long to ascend, but he did say that while making the safety stop was the wrong choice, that I did it because you do it every dive isn’t a bad habit, just inappropriate for this situation.
Anyway, the chick felt bad about panicking and for getting how to sort herself out, but we went back down and finished the dive. Afterwards she apologized profusely to everyone in the group and the second dive she made sure she was very close the entire time.
Me, on the boat: “If there is anything that you can’t communicate and you absolutely need to, grab me and write it down.”
Her, 10m down: “Umm, is water in my ears ok it feels kind of funny but it doesn’t hurt or anything just feels weird but I just want to make sure that it’s not going to do anything bad to my ears.” The word concise is apparently not part of her vocabulary.
dont worry about the dive guy
when I lead dives we did it two ways you stay with me I lead the dive all responsibility on me to guide and make people keep up but the briefing top side covers this very very very well in a super nice way
or you are on your own I go down and kinda keep tabs with a few who want to see things since I know where ever critter is and the dive spot
but if you want to separate I say OK you have to surface at the boat come up the line most boats I worked on all have ascent lines and also say what time why I watch is nice
I would never yell at a guy for doing a safety stop ever !
if you did not come up the ascent line I might say hey next time please its for your safety cause of boat traffic but 20 meters is nothing its when they pop up waving their arms 200 meters that used to freak me out then its a rescue haahah had a few of those
live boat is a whole other game about coming up and live boat dives we always lead to keep the group together since its often a long wall drift dive or something
those are fun we used to do one on our own for fun in a area with about 5 knot current wwwhhhhhheeeeeee
lesson learned know your dive partner and pre plan what your signals are and how you want to dive
if the dive guide never says anything about times on boat where to ascend etc…
maybe its more a Caribbean or Hawaii thing to be more relaxed as a dive guide hahahaha