All Fingers and Thumbs on the DSMB Course!

So last weekend was my DSMB course, delayed surface marker buoy and for this there were two dives. It wasn’t the most challenging of courses but it’s one you need if you’re going to be diving in the sea and it did require having to be careful throughout.

So the way we were taught to arrange out DSMB and reel was with the DSMB tied using bungee to the bottom of the BCD so it sits on the small of your back. This keeps your trim good and reduces drag but it easy to access. The reel is then clipped onto a D ring on the BCD.

Dive one: we descended to about 9m, kneel down and using a stage to represent the Octo (to avoid any of our actual Octo’s free flowing on the training dive) we deployed the DSMB using this method. So a few bubbles from the Regulator we’re breathing from into the DSMB to make it stand up, then attached the DSMB to the reel and then use the Octo from the stage to fill it with enough air, so when we let go up it goes standing nicely firm at the surface. Feel free to add whatever innuendo’s come to mind at this point, there were a few jokes going around on the day!

Sounds simple this method. It’s not.

Well it is, but I was all fingers and thumbs with it being my first time attempting this. Having to hold a DSMB, a reel, an Octo and remembering to dump air from your BCD all together takes a little brain power! I couldn’t keep the DSMB open and I felt like I was taking an age to fill it. Practise will quicken me up I think. I was also wearing 5mm gloves as well, so feeling a little fingers and thumbs I think is fairly normally for a first attempt. But I did it and that’s what matters.

Next after the Divemaster has gone up, let the air out and we’ve reeled in the DSMB we do it again but this time instead of using the Octo, we use the bubbles from the regulator. This is much easier! No juggling necessary, just make sure to keep enough distance from DSMB and regulator to not get it caught on any of your gear. I liked that way, that way felt much easier even though the first way wasn’t particularly hard just had more ‘faffing’ to it.

Dive one over we enjoyed a cup of tea in the café and prepared for dive two. Using whatever method we preferred, Octo or bubbles, we were going to send the DSMB up whilst hovering and at a depth of about 14metres give or take. We were aiming to do it near a sunken plane.

My dive two started out with me falling, backwards, cylinder and head first over a ledge. I believe the technical term for the position in which your cylinder seems to have rolled you over is, “turtling”. I call I my accidental attempt more like “dying ant impression”. 😀 Not my most graceful of descents I will admit!

I had my buddy thoroughly amused and my core strength definitely needs building up after my sustained flailing didn’t help so much in turning me the right way up! All experience is good experience though, I did eventually manage to right myself once I’d paused, stopped squirming and thought through how to turn myself over. The rest of the descent happened much more gracefully I’m pleased to say.

We ended up kneeling on the wing of an aeroplane for the demonstration and I have to say, being able to say that I was sat on the wing of a plane is definitely a highlight of my diving. I was pretty taken with this part of the dive!

I chose to send my DSMB up using the bubbles method and I did do it whilst hovering, well, more or less, I did have to let out some air out from my BCD when I started floating up a bit but it was fairly successful. The line of the reel had wound itself just one turn around the reel so when I sent up the DSMB my first thought was, “oops”, my second thought didn’t even occur because I had gently flicked the line which immediately sorted everything out and the DSMB was deployed with no trouble. Excellent. If that hadn’t have worked, I would have been letting go of that reel when the DSMB went rocketing up. They go up so fast!

We finished that dive with a little bimble around, down and over the plane to get us all used to reeling in and letting out the line. I clocked 14m when I deployed it and I passed the course. Excellent. I then went back to the dive centre to hand in loaned gear and was roped into signing on for the rescue course!

Well I hadn’t contemplated doing this rescue course…. Ever. I don’t like “personal bubble invasion” especially with people I don’t know but diving seems to be pushing all my limits, social, physical, mental, everything and I suppose it is a good thing. I was told this rescue course will be hard but so much fun. And rewarding. My friend was signed up for it and I can jump on her course so I wouldn’t be with all strangers. Even better is that I know the instructor and she is brilliant so all my arguments for wanting to wait a while, seemed to go out of the window when 4 Instructors, 2 Divemasters and 2 other divers were all telling me this.

In the end, they got me signed up explaining the value of such a course. Self-rescue, preventing problems and being able to help your buddy are skills that you can’t really do without, especially since I intend to work up to being a cave diver. I need this course really and I understand the benefits of having it under my belt.

So, I passed one course and signed up for another and I’m now working my way through the manual for the rescue course. There are two theory and two pool sessions followed by open water dives to complete the course. All of this will be taking place over the course of three weekends so that should keep me busy!

I’m going to end by saying I’m so happy I’ve just bought a camera with an underwater case for it! In colloquial terms, “ten ton” of courses and a camera later, I am certainly feeling like I’ve been diving years, never mind 6 months!

 

Lil Scuba Diver

A Capernwray Dive

Being up at 7am to be ready for 8am on a Sunday morning is pretty hard for a night owl like me but I was going diving so I’ll let it slide. I went to a place called Capernwray. It’s a flooded quarry that has purposely sunken planes, boats, fairground carousel horses and much more. It’s basically a diver’s playground! There are also training platforms at 2metres and 6metres. This is where I got my open water qualification from and I have done many a mask flood and fin pivot on these platforms already and my dive life has only just started!

Of all the hobbies I picked, I had to pick the one designed for an early bird! An early bird with good biceps for all the lifting that is required! I made it though, I was picked up at 8am all ready and raring to go. This dive for me felt like a particularly important one. The goal for me was to hopefully become comfortable in the reduced visibility that comes with diving here in the UK. I passed my advanced and deep dive in Malta with brilliant visibility. This was a dive was with a friend I trusted and had done a lot of training with, so we sort of knew how each other dived but even so this was our first time with no instructor in the water.

It was a lovely day for diving, very warm. I think was about 25 degrees outside and the water temperature was about 12 to 14 degrees which was great! That’s still dry suit, hood and gloves weather but at least it shows promise of days to come when a dry suit isn’t needed.

While we were gearing up three swans flew over our heads so close I could almost feel the wind from their wings! They made a lot of noise and I can honestly say I could have reached up and touched them they were flying that low. Incredible. That made us all pause for a few seconds to watch them as they flew off.

My friend wanted to see the thunderbird 4; a replica of the model from the tv show. I wanted to see one of the horses that had come from a fairground so we planned a dive that was fairly straight forward. A there and back again dive that by-passed the horse as we made for the thunderbird 4. We were told we could find other things around that area if we used all sort of bearings but we decided to just get in, make for the thunderbird and just have a nice, easy dive.

To our surprise however, we ended up seeing quite a lot! We saw the horse first and I wasn’t prepared for how comical it looked! It sort of looked like it was laughing which made me start giggling away to myself in the water. I stood right next to it to measure myself against it, I had no idea it was be as big as it was. I’m 4 foot 11 and it was about my height and that plus some, length wise. So pretty big!

We saw an Apecks van, made it to the Thunderbird 4, saw a boat we were not expecting and then had no idea which way was back! All of this was at 6 metres so we popped up to the surface to get our bearings before going back down. We had got slightly confused and gone back on ourselves but weren’t too far from the exit. On the way back we unexpectedly by-passed the second horse, this time it was reading a newspaper! I’m rather unobservant so I missed the devil statue that was just behind it but my friend saw it.

Of the wildlife we saw, I was really not expecting sturgeon to be that big! I’ve never seen a sturgeon fish before and didn’t know they could grow so much. They must get fed steroids or something! Jet black with a curl to the nose, it looked slightly evil as if it was snarling.

There was also brown and rainbow trout, also on steroids J Then my favourite from this quarry was Perch. I saw quite a lot of them. They have what looks like tiger stripes on their bodies but I really like that their fins were orange. I was constantly on the lookout for these Perch fish. I thought at one point that I was a little too close to the floor and worrying that I might be kicking up the sand yet this Perch just decided to swim right underneath me, totally not bothered by me or my fins. It just bimbled about as if saying, “move this is my home I’m swimming here”. That made me smile a little.

I did learn one lesson during the dive though. I find that latex neck seals on a dry suit make me gag when I’m not in the water. I have my own dry suit on order with a neoprene neck seal to combat this but as I was under the water trying to equalise my ears I found myself gagging a little. Thinking nothing unusual about it except that it doesn’t usually happen underwater, I later took off the dry suit to find my beads still around my neck! Definitely not recommended! I’m thinking they may have contributed to my momentary gagging. No more bead wearing on dive days for health and safety reasons! Sometimes it’s best not to learn the hard way but let’s just say I won’t be forgetting to take off my jewellery any time soon!

In short, it was a very exciting dive and I saw much more than I was expecting. I’ve been in Capernwray quite a few times now and I have never seen as many fish as I did this weekend. The visibility ranged from 6 to 10 metres which was much better than I was thought we would get. I was actually quite pleased with how good the visibility was.

I had a brilliant day and the warm weather made it even better and really helped my tan / burn along as well! Club dive is on the cards for next week now.

 

Lil Scuba Diver

Breakthrough Dive :D

Initially I was going to post my journey as a scuba diver in chorological order, I was going to do this simply because I was felt I was on a journey – a big one. I started off so scared and was expecting that fear to slowly ebb away the more I did it but that isn’t how it happened.

I had a breakthrough dive. Quite literally. In Malta actually. I was four days into a week away and I was always scared. I had messed up a giant stride not long before Malta because I hadn’t kept hold of my mask properly. I also didn’t stride in gracefully I more like fell in, bottom first and my mask moved up my face so I panicked. It’s quite funny looking back on it, I did turn the air blue with my rather colourful language but this meant that unfortunately I started off in Malta even more scared than I had been back in England.

I was still scared under the water and I didn’t know why. I couldn’t relax and was so focused on trying to calm down and stop my “faffing” as I call it. You know the song, “heads, shoulders, knees and toes”? and how you touch each of the body parts? Well my divers panic has the same rhythm only it’s, “reg, mask, nose, head and reg”. That was me, touching everything, especially my nose, I had this urge to make sure my mask wasn’t filling up because if water goes near my nose I think I’m going to end up snorting it and choking under water.

I was also still sculling quite a lot as well. On day two I finally reached the point where I almost gave up. I was so annoyed that I was so scared and I knew that if I got out the water that day, I wouldn’t get back in. I’d spent five months trying to get over this fear and it was only getting worse, that at that moment, I was at breaking point. I was ready to give it all up and call it a day. Diving wasn’t for me. The instructor asked me if I wanted to get out and I was close to saying yes. But I said no. I went back down and finished the dive, still scared but knowing I was hanging on by a thread. I only needed to last another ten minutes. And I did.

Two days later, still very nervous in the water I had was told not to try going for my wreak and deep dives because I was so uncomfortable still. I was advised to finish my advanced but then try some pleasure dives and build up to being a more confident diver. I was gutted. I wanted to succeed in this, letting fear stop me getting the specialities felt like a defeat in a way and yet I could clearly see that I needed some practise. So I asked if I could do the deep dive of the advanced course and then decide what to do regarding the specialties I had paid to do. At this point, it looked as if I was going to be postponing any more training dives.

About half an hour after being told all this, I entered the water thinking it would be my last training dive and I would be scared again and start my ‘faffing’ before we even finished descending. Only, I descended completely calm.

We started going down, further than I had been before and I could see the depth. The visibility was great though and my buddy started to signal “ok” to me. Checking. I answered, pleasantly surprised she was asking me when so far I wasn’t displaying signs of distress as I usually do. A few minutes later she asked again. I answered that I was ok and I was surprised that I actually was ok. I felt great. When panicking and not comfortable it’s so easy to not see the fish! It sounds silly but whole schools of fish can pass you by but if you’re concentrating on your mask and you reg and making sure your buoyancy is ok, you can literally miss them. And that had been frustrating me. Seeing the marine life calms me down when I’m scared so it’s so ironic that when I’m scared I don’t see any. On this deep dive however I’m suddenly seeing so much! The reef walls were colourful. Fish were everywhere! I was noticing the colour around me and finally appreciating the brilliant visibility we had!

As a group we get to the deepest point of this particular dive and we’re all glancing at our dive computers to see the variations between them and we’re looking at our nitrox supply noting how much we’ve used in relation to shallower dives and I’m still feeling ok. I was a tiny bit nervous at one point but even that was barely registering to me. Then we’re heading back and I remember thinking, “flipping eck this dive is short!” It felt as if I’d been under maybe ten minutes, no more.

Usually I’m more than happy to end the dive and get back on land completely disappointed in my myself I vow to do better next time yet this dive was so different! I felt as if I could have stayed there for so much longer. So I checked my air and find that going back is a good call, naturally, the instructor was the one making the call, for good reason!

As we’re going back I was so calm that I finally felt like a diver! I was seeing red star fish, rainbow wrasse, soft coral, urchins and so on and it was incredible! I wanted to know the name of every fish I saw and I was already telling myself I was going to research marine life when I got back home. I was actively looking around trying to find interesting fish and had a favourite! The Rainbow Wrasse soon became my favourite fish and there were quite a few of them. They always got my attention.

I didn’t want to leave the water. I had a breakthrough! And that dive was honestly one the best moments in my life.

All the fear just vanished. It was weird. I think being told I wasn’t ready made me think, I can do this. Or maybe the pressure to do so many courses in such a small space of time, had lifted and made me feel relieved. Maybe it was just me finally getting the calm to carry on when I was beginning to think I would never get there. Whatever happened, the change happened in one dive. It wasn’t gradual at all, it was abrupt! One dive I was a going through the motions, scared and mind-blanking, the next I felt awe and tranquillity and a peace I usually have when I go swimming.

I did actually decide to do one of the specialities. I went on to do the deep diver speciality and I would just like to say, I wasn’t narked either. My calm was my own breakthrough. We did a little ‘puzzle’ It was fairly simple but on land it took me 10 seconds. At a depth of 28metres the puzzle took me 12 seconds, so narcosis wasn’t having such a big effect on me to change my attitude to diving which was a positive insight and rather encouraging.

By the end of the week I was enjoying every dive and when I did my first proper pleasure dive I had so much fun. I even saw an electric sting ray! Persevering was definitely worth it and if I can give advice to anyone it would be this: If you want it, keep trying! Practise really does make perfect.

I’m now signing off and going to look for my next diving adventure! J

 

Lil Scuba Diver

Pool Session #1

Hi!

I want to write about my first pool session. Now I’m qualified I want to share the experience and look back at everything I did and how far I’ve come. A few things were hard for me in learning and while I want to encourage people to take up diving, I also want to share my story because what I found hard, I’ve been told, so do a lot of other people.

When I was doing my Open Water I was scheduled for three pool sessions before the open water elements that took place over a weekend. The open water part was four dives split across two days. I decided to combine the open water with the Dry Suit speciality because this is the UK and you need a dry suit to dive. It also worked out cheaper and less hassle to combine the two courses by doing a third dive on the Sunday in order to complete that speciality. Dry suit normally requires 2 dives but since some of the dry suit skills would have already been covered across the four open water dives, only one extra dive is needed which makes combining fairly logical in this instance.

That was the theory to how I would qualify but life rarely likes to follow a plan. It wouldn’t be as interesting then though!

I had to go back again for my open water dives after a disastrous first dive but I’ll get to that. These pool sessions followed a morning of theory looking at things like, why you float, air density and how to put the kit together etc.

The way the theory works is you are given a book with sections and a DVD. You watch the DVD and read the corresponding sections. Nearly every page has a couple of multiple choice question to do to ensure you’re retaining the information as you read and at the end of each section is a knowledge review. It’s this review that was marked in the class part of the courses. In the class part there were again multiple choice tests, nothing hard, nothing new, everything you read in the book and watched on the DVD. At the end of the three weeks was a test you had to pass, to qualify and even this was no different. It was multiple choice, and again, everything had already been told to you and explained at least twice maybe even more, before the test.

And dive tables aren’t half as confusing as they first look! There is a book that lay out how to use them in a very straight forward and easily understood manner and a good instructor (mine was) will also explain and go through it and help if it is confusing

I had two different instructors throughout the pool sessions, one did day one and the other did both days two and three. Both were brilliant! And both instructors were actually there when I was borrowing a shorty and couldn’t decide if I needed a bigger size. Instructor two was adamant the small was the right size, I on the other hand promptly explained my coat hid a few roles and a medium would be better! To which I was then asked if I had ever worn a corset. I answered an honest yes and … let the awkwardness commence – he asked! But basically tight but not so you can’t breathe was the point of that question, and a small was the size I ended up wearing. But anyway, awkward wardrobe conundrums aside (fashion is clearly not high up on priorities in the diving industry) practical follows theory.

Pool session one began with us having to swim lengths and tread water for ten minutes to ensure that we could actually swim. Thankfully, having chosen a water sport (extreme sport apparently) we all could swim and were rather bored as we awkwardly counted down the ten minutes. By this session, we had already put our kit together three times in the shop. That is a requirement, you need to have done it five times by the end of the course, I did it three on day one alone.

One of the first things we did once kneeling at the bottom of the pool was regulator recovery, so throw it away, recover it, and then clear it (of water) before breathing. So blow out or press the purge button to clear it.

Word of advice, it took me two attempts before the instructor told me (with a smile), that you don’t need to push the plunge button hard, a light tap will do and believe me a huge gush of air hitting your mouth at full force doesn’t help!

The instructor was so patient with me, there were four of us in the pool and I kept going to the surface, first because of my plunge skills and then because we had to do a partial mask flood. I couldn’t clear my mask, once the water goes under my nose it feels like I’m going to breathe it and I panic. Notice the presence tense there, I still don’t like it. I certainly hated it on day one but everything gets easier with practise and I’ve had a lot of that now. Five times I had to try the mark clearing on that day though and by then we had established that I was not very good at that skill. This did end up becoming a problem for me for a while. The others were fine with it, so I want to stress that not everyone has a problem with it, but if you are one of them who does, you are not alone.

Other skills covered in session one were, snorkel and reg exchange, tightening the strap around a cylinder underwater, weights off and back on again and lastly share air with a buddy. I soon had to learn to put my hygiene worries aside since I was third in line to use the octopus that had been well and truly passed around! You have to make friends quick in diving! And I’m ending this blog by saying that you do. I’m still friends with a girl I tentatively tried to hang around with on that first day. It’s really lovely to pick up a hobby and friends at the same time. I was so worried about the social side of diving and I really didn’t need to be. I have yet to meet someone I don’t like and I’ve been diving for four months now. The class size was small that day there was only four of us and we were trying to help each other and learn ourselves so we got chatting pretty quickly and I was soon excited to go back the week after!

Lil Scuba Diver x

Intro Post

Hi!

I’m a newly qualified open water diver from the UK and while this is my first blog, I have wrote and will post about my experience on passing the open water qualification, let’s just say it took me a little longer than expected to pass but I already have some funny stories! They include pressing the plunge with a little too much force while the reg is still in my mouth(!) excellent way to simulate whiplash! A bottom first failed giant stride! And realising that putting a dry suit on, is rather like giving birth to your own head! :O

Remarkably I’m still diving, still learning, I’m not the most confident yet but I’ve signed up for a holiday in Malta and about 6 courses while I’m there. So it’s going to be pretty full on, but what better way to see Malta to the fullest than with a plan that shows you lots of elements to diving? I am thoroughly looking forward to it and can’t wait to document my time there.

I have all my kit from the dive centre I qualified with, going to Malta with and am a member of. I love the club! So much support! I can’t praise it enough, I struggled with certain things in the open water and they could have exploited so much money out of me, but no, extra pool sessions, a couple of attempts to pass Open water and Dry suit course all for no extra cost, neither did they charge me extra to rent the kit for those days either. I was given one to one pool sessions where I got to go over all my fears and work on the skills. It was brilliant so here I am, eager to write about my diving experiences!

So this blog is basically my way of documenting all the really cool things, I do and see in diving! There’s literally a whole world out there that now I can explore! And so many lovely people to make friends with and share the experience around. I’ll post about my pool sessions and open water sessions in another blog and while they were quite a trial for me at the time, I hope that they show that while some people can fly through the course, some need a little extra time and that’s ok, with a bit of persistence and a good sense of humour, anyone can become qualified and have fun!

Oh and one key fact I can already give you about diving is this; It is not a glamourous sport!

So beware, make up is not your friend, dry suits don’t give you any figure at all while wet suits give you too much of a figure. Dive hoods are not flattering for anyone and spitting in the mask is a well accepted practise! Face coral happens, no one bats an eye but it’s definitely not the look to go for when trying to pull someone!

With all this in mind, I hope you enjoy reading about my eventful hobby!

Lil Scuba Diver x