30 minutes in, 16 minutes out.
I need to take you to my favorite places. Peacock is really cool down some of the little traveled jump tunnels.
Also as you get more experience you awareness to look around gets better. Lots of tunnels I thought were small are a lot larger after dozens of dives in the systems.
LOL! Yep!
I'm down.
I know I was only seeing the "beginner" areas, so I didn't mean to sound like I have written Peacock off entirely. Only that my class experience - up to the point of diving Little River - had not done anything to really make me want to continue cave diving after I finished the class. But, once I saw Little River, then I knew "yeah, I would like to come back here!"
Awesome!!! Thank you for taking the time to write the report. You are most excellent as always!!
Was your taking the 10 day in a row course a scheduling requirement or was it mandatory to do it this way? In other words, could you have taken a day or two off every few days of the course?
Another question: Instead of a CCr crossover, could you have done the entire course on CCr and not a crossover (for extra training and experience)?
I could have done a shorter course, to only do Full Cave on OC, then come back later for CCR or Stage. Or, I *could* have (probably) done a shorter course to only get CCR Cave. Another friend of mine had no prior cave or cavern training (but was already a tech diver with Adv Wreck) and he did only CCR with Joe.
But, the other student had already set things up with Joe for the schedule we had and I was happy to jump on the train and do what we did.
The Stage Cave part of the course was purely optional. I do believe that, if I had wanted to forego that cert, I could have taken the time off when those 4 dives were being done (1 whole day and part of another), and then still done the CCR Cave.
If someone wanted to schedule the class with Joe so that there were only 2 dives per day, instead of 3, and more days, I would imagine Joe would be fine with that. Having a day in the middle with no diving would probably be something Joe would work with, too, if you really wanted. But, with all the other options to make the pace easier, I couldn't see doing that, myself.
Joe's an old friend of mine. He believes a person is either cave trained and certified, or not. He doesn't do incremental steps with breaks in between. It's a philosophical thing. While I'm in the other camp (put breaks in to get experience), Joe's starting point is a person that usually has some significant experience with tech diving where mine is usually a person with minimal experience tech diving.
BTW - I had coffee with Joe the morning after this class and got the blow by blow.
^ this. Joe says "you're either a cave diver or you're not." He doesn't believe in sending people into a cave without the full set of tools. So, he doesn't teach Apprentice (or Intro). He says that once you get an Apprentice/Intro card, why would you ever come back for more training? That card gets you into the caves and, from there, there is no Cave Police that are going to stop you doing the things you aren't trained for. He said too many people never come back to get the full training, but they do dive in the caves doing things that were not covered in their Apprentice/Intro training. And, of course, we all know that diving beyond your training and cert limits is a major factor in all types of scuba accidents.
He said they did ok. Joe wouldn't issue a card if they hadn't.
Ha ha! Cool. I have no illusions that I was his bestest student ever or anything like that. But, it made me feel pretty good during the next to last day when we came out from our first dive and he said "you guys actually looked like cave divers that time!" And we managed to keep that up for the remainder of the dives. He said we never kicked up the bottom at all during the entire last two days. And he even admitted to screwing with us on the last OC dive by telling us to go into P1 and make the jump into the Nicholson Tunnel. We had not been in there prior to that dive. He figured for sure we'd kick it up some trying to get in and out of there, but he said we didn't at all. My right shoulder is sore now from patting myself on the back! LOL
Seriously, though. I don't feel like I'm really a cave diver, yet. But, I do feel like I'm well prepared to go diving in caves without an instructor and eventually develop the experience and skill to be a cave diver some day.
