Is Solo Pool Practice OK?

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htatton

Contributor
Messages
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Location
Stevensville, MT
# of dives
100 - 199
I really need water practice and I live a long ways from warm water. My local indoor pool has agreed to allow early morning practice sessions with scuba gear. What are your thoughts on the safety of this idea. It seems OK to me but I am newly certified with only 10 dives logged so I need your suggestions.

Thanks
 
I think you're going to get a lot of people saying one of the following: you should always dive with a buddy, and a lot that say that most pool dives are all solo dives anyway and when you're in approx 15 feet of water it's not that big of a deal.

The only thing you will need to seriously consider is what are you going to do if you have a problem? Are the lifeguards at the pool trained to dive and more so, trained to recognize you are having a problem when you're meant to be underwater anyway. I know our life guards here hate us because they don't know if they ever have to get involved other than "seeing a ton of bubbles suddenly appear at the surface" (as quoted by one guard here). If you have a heart attack or other medical problem then what? What if you're trying to doing reg recoveries but you're accidentally kneeling on your hose now, or just can't find it, or you blow an o-ring etc etc etc. Bottom line, I would have at least another person near you doing similar practice so you have some kind of an out should something go wrong that you can't take care of yourself especially being newly certified with only 10 dives. I know it may not be deep but it doesn't take much to drown. My 2 cents anyway.
 
I really need water practice and I live a long ways from warm water. My local indoor pool has agreed to allow early morning practice sessions with scuba gear. What are your thoughts on the safety of this idea. It seems OK to me but I am newly certified with only 10 dives logged so I need your suggestions.

Thanks

Frankly I'm surprised that any pool facility without a dive program would allow it.

Enjoy it while you can... before their insurance company or lawyer finds out and puts an end to it.
 
Frankly I'm surprised that any pool facility without a dive program would allow it.

Enjoy it while you can... before their insurance company or lawyer finds out and puts an end to it.

I was actually thinking the same thing. I'm very surprised they are cool with it.
 
Honestly, you are what, 3 fin kicks from the surface at the deep end of the pool?

I spent a lot of my first summer as a diver in our home pool (max depth 9') by myself, simply because I needed the practice and the pool was there.

The great thing about open circuit is that your gear is not going to kill you underwater. In a pool, you have no entanglement hazard, no current, no navigational issues. Yes, if you set yourself a complex enough problem, you can end up wide-eyed (as I did during my first try at the gear swap for my DM class) but nothing you are likely to do as a beginner will get you there.

Practice in the pool. You aren't completely alone, because no public pool is without a lifeguard.
 
I would kill for such an opportunity, especially early on while still working on skills... the previous pool I used charged $75 per visit, and now I can only practice in open water.
 
I can only tell from my personal experience. I go to our local pool (olympic size, with 2 and 4 meters depth at one end) once or twice a week, with minimal scuba gear. That means a 2mm shortie, boots, fins, wing+harness and one 4 liter sidemounted cylinder, it is enough for 30 mins practice. I also use an ocean reef ffm, not a standard 2nd stage.
At the beginning, the pool administrator was a bit concerned from 2 reasons, one being that severals years ago, another diver, in the same pool, got in an OOA situation and remained on the bottom without regulator in mouth. Lifeguard noticed a bit too late this, got him out from the water with some serious effort and made cpr. The diver recovered eventually. How did he got in OOA in a 4 m pool, don't ask, it's beyond me. I don't know who he was, what level of training he had (if any), what equipment, etc. The second reason is with the lifeguard. They are not trained to rescue divers with heavy cilinders, operate their equipment (bcd inflator) nor trained to recongize when a diver is in difficulty. For examples, I sometime do some slow breathing exercise underwater, I stay completely still and exhale maybe once or twice a minute. I may look pretty much dead for some people. Anyway, after a conversation with the administrator, they allowed me to do my thing.
Some other issues to which I personally like to pay attention are in relation with other swimmers from the pool. This is because I like to minimise the chances to disturb them, I am after all an unusual intruder in the pool.
-at 2 meters I swim always between lanes, the water is pretty shallow, and some swimmers may hit me. I am not concerned about me being hitted, I am concerned about my metal cylinder causing serious pain to others. This is why I use a small cylinder sidemounted, but for some others, the cylinder may be big and back mounted.
-I stay well away from lanes with childrens. Some of them may be scared of me and some may be distracted by me. That FFM tend to make me some sort of Darth Vader freak.. Swimming instructors told me that, otherwise I would not realised it.
-I also stay away from people with mental disabilities, if I see them. This actually happened to me, one such swimmer told me that I scared the heck out of him. I tried to calm him down but in the water you never know how he would react...
 
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As long as there is a lifeguard on duty and you tell them what you are doing you should be fine. I highly recommend using tank boots to help protect the pool.
 

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