Cave diving with Trace course review

[Superlyte27]

So, I was part of the team that brought 30 divers from China to Florida to learn to cave dive with IANTD as a zero to hero class. As were some of the people who are reading this page right now.

At some point during their time here, the discussion came up about backup masks. Keep in mind, that there were 10+ cave instructors, most of which had been teaching for 2+ decades and between them all, easily had 10,000+ dives. In all of that time, all of the instructors who were present for the conversation, not a single one of them had ever lost a mask on any dive, let alone a cave dive.

I’ve been cave diving 21 or 22 years. This will be a slower year for me with something like 300 hours underwater this year. I’ve never lost a mask. I can think of a better use of my pocket space than the very unlikely event that I’d lose one now. Just my two cents as an old timer.

 

[Beau640]

we are talking about people that have been Cave diving longer than I have been alive. Rather than sitting behind a screen and judging someone’s practice who has more experience at this than You or I probably ever will accumulate in our lifetime, it was a lot more useful during the class to learn about why people are doing the things they are doing. For example what superlyte described.

 

[The Chairman]

Another example would be at Peacock I routinely saw people not running guidelines from open water into the cave.

All the lines going into the cave presented a real problem on busy days. The gold line was brought out close to the exit and we've been encouraged to not run those lines there.

 

[tursiops]

we've been encouraged

by whom?

 

[The Chairman]

by whom?

Every instructor I've had. I ran a line in there once, back in '02 and my instructor pointed out that we were doing this for the class only since no one runs a line in there except for class.

Every cave is unique. Every diver is unique. Thinking that there is one and only way of doing things just means you probably haven't been doing it very long. You can see the diving pressure throughout the Peacock system, so there's simply no need making it worse. BTW, OW divers are banned from there so it's fine putting the gold line in site of the opening.

 

[Compressor]

Just finished up “zero to hero” with @Trace Malinowski

Rather than give a day by day breakdown of everything we did, will just give an overall picture of what the course was like and then what I think about his teaching style.


The course took 8 days but could be done in 7 if you wanted to push yourself. We had scheduled 10 days of total time to include class + fun diving after class and so we went at a comfortable pace and stretched it to 8 days of class. The class itself was standard. Powerpoint slides in the morning which was pretty terrible. PSAI doesn’t have any online material and requires you to go through the slides with the instructor. The slides are essentially verbatim copy of the book you have to read before you come to class and so it is a completely waste of time. Trace recognized this as well and has been trying to get rid of the slides however it’s a requirement by the agency. Then there would be land drills which were very useful. Then 2 75ish minute dives a day. Over the class time we went to three systems – peacock springs, ginnie springs, and little river. Days tended to be about 12 hours long total.


Overall this was the best training I’ve ever received. Trace is very laid back overall, but takes your training seriously. This will not be militant style degrading training, but also will not be aa “just put in the class time and you are guaranteed a pass.” He is very good about keeping you on your toes and figuring out both where you excel and where you need more work. When he finds your weakness, he will exploit it and make you work hard to improve over the upcoming dives. I feel like there was a drastic improvement in my ability over the course time.

One thing I really enjoyed is that Trace will teach you what the technical standards are and what technically the manuals say you are supposed to do on a dive, and make you do that too in the beginning, but then will on later dives explain to you realistically what everyone is doing and how everyone is diving. His philosophy is to teach you the right way but also explain to you what everyone else is doing around you so that when the class is over and you are diving without an instructor you know how everyone in the area is realistically diving.

He also takes a lot of time to teach you how to actually dive each cave. Other instructors will constantly hammer you with failures and break you over and over every dive of the class. By the end of the class you will be comfortable with failures, but will have no idea how to actually cave dive. Trace will take time to teach you the subtleties of each cave and how to actually be an excellent cave diver (assuming you’ve proven to him earlier that you can handle the failures, and still every now and again they will be thrown in to make sure you are staying on your toes).


In summary, I would recommend Trace to anyone who is looking to learn to cave dive, is willing to work hard and take it seriously, but also wants to have fun doing it. I’ve already scheduled some other courses with him. Was well worth the time and money.

Thank you for the nice report. Kudos to Trace as well.

 

[kensuf]

Masks don't take a lot of space and losing one on a dive can suck. Tyler Moon lost a lens in a mask at the Hinkel, literally, the plastic frame retainer broke and the lens popped out. I know 3 other people that have either at one point in time, or currently, hold world records in linear penetration that had major mask problems on extreme dives. Two were fog related and one was a leaky skirt caused by a small tear.

OTOH, while I have had primary light failures, I have never needed to use both backup lights. But you wouldn't catch me not carrying two backup lights.

 

[kensuf]

On primary lines.. Knowing how to run a reel is incredibly important. The "biggest" problem I see is people that don't run the line next to a wall during a step/down descent, instead they let the line go at an angle into space, this can potentially cause entanglement hazards for other teams. The most common problem I see is people not knowing how to properly do a secondary with a line lock. The third most common problem is doing the primary too far away from an entrance, especially at Devil's Ear (I've seen people try to start their tie-off at the log, really??)

IMHO, I also believe gold lines should be as close to the exit as possible and that if you have a safe exit from the gold line, it may not be necessary to run a reel. You get 5 teams that all feel they need to run their own reel in Devil's Eye and you have a mess.

 

[Superlyte27]

Masks don't take a lot of space and losing one on a dive can suck. Tyler Moon lost a lens in a mask at the Hinkel, literally, the plastic frame retainer broke and the lens popped out. I know 3 other people that have either at one point in time, or currently, hold world records in linear penetration that had major mask problems on extreme dives. Two were fog related and one was a leaky skirt caused by a small tear.

OTOH, while I have had primary light failures, I have never needed to use both backup lights. But you wouldn't catch me not carrying two backup lights.

Everything you describe came as a result of bad equipment maintenance. Batteries don't die on masks. They do on lights. Good analogy... not.

 

[PfcAJ]

Ill take a backup mask depending on the dive.

If its something where not being able to see would be a real hinderance, I take one.