auchmeddan

We finished our “Night Diving Specialty” course on Thursday night. There really wasn’t much to it if you are already comfortable diving in the dark. The conditions were not ideal though, with reasonably big surf breaking, and constant surge under the water. We finally found an octopus at the end of the dive, which was the highlight.

On the way back out, I was knocked over by a wave and end up sitting on my arse in about a foot of water waiting for the next wave to come and slap me. My fins are really not very user friendly to take off in that sort of situation…well, at least not when you are holding a camera in one hand. I got knocked over a few times until Jules took my camera off me, and I was able to put my hand down to get up.

We ended the night with a couple of beers (for me) and a chat to a motorcycle speed-freak called Eric who was on the course with us, even though he’d clocked about 150 night dives.

In conditions like that I probably would not take my camera out again as the surf was not very kind to it. It didn’t leak, but the amount of sand I found wedged against the O-rings after I opened it was a little worrying. I’ve cleaned it once, but will check and clean it again tomorrow.

We started day 2 of our Rescue Diver course today and did some panicked and unresponsive diver skills below and on top of the water. We had some fun with water exits (carrying unresponsive or weak divers out of the water) and ran through towing a unresponsive diver, removing the gear from both of you, and getting them out of the water all while providing rescue breathing. Very good skills to learn, and pretty enjoyable.

I got picked on a couple of times today though. Once, while running through panicked diver skills underwater, Ondrej sneaked up behind me and turned off my air. It took a couple of breaths before my Regulator ceased working, and at that point I decided to do a Controlled Emergency Swimming Ascent(CESA) to the surface. A CESA is swimming up slowly to the surface while blowing bubbles out the whole time(to avoid lung overexpansion injuries). I did it as we were only in about 10ft of water, and it was an easy CESA to make. In reality though, proper procedure would have been to signal “out of air” and get Jules Octopus to breath from but as we were shallow it seemed quicker to CESA. “Out of Air” isn’t something I’d like to experience deep, when I’d definitely need to secure Jules Octopus. It was a good lesson for both of us.

The Second time I got picked on left me with a large bump on my head. I was bent over putting my gear on when Jules picked up her BCD and Tank and swung it over her shoulder. She hit me right in the head with her First-stage or tank (I’m not sure which) and it really bloody hurt! I cursed her out (of course) for not looking around before swinging her tank blindly over her shoulder and I hope she’s learned something from it and will be more careful in future, but I’m not convinced. I may start wearing a football helmet around her

Who knows what injuries I’ll end up with on day Three? As long as no-one partially drowns me, I think I’ll be OK.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 3rd, 2005 at 3:58 pm and is filed under Bermuda, Diving. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.