sabbath999
Contributor
I did my four OW dives this weekend.
I am in Missouri, and we did our dives in a quarry. There were 10 of us at the start.
Dive 1 & 2 we did on Saturday (Yesterday). Visibility was about 10 feet. The first dive was the "tooling around" dive, we went to over the training platform, descended on a rope, and then went out with dive-masters to tour the eastern end of the quarry. We had our main instructor and 3 dive-masters (all of whom are certified instructors) for 10 students.
One of our members freaked out at the low visibility, and she went right back up and that was the end of it for her. Her husband stayed and my buddy and I "adopted" him since we now had an odd number of students.
During our surface interval, we trained on the usual surface skill (tired diver tow, etc.)
Dive 2 featured all the usual skills, everybody did fine. I had no troubles with equalization or anything else, it was all pretty strait forward, and we then did another tour of the quarry.
Saturday night, the area got 5+ inches of rain.
Today (Sunday) we did dives 3 and 4. We picked up a guy who just needed those two dives to complete his cert and our class was back to 10.
Visibility was... well... horrible. The water level of the quarry had raised nearly 3 feet, and visibility on the training platform (which they use to keep the students from stirring up muck on the bottom) was 1 to 2 feet depending on whether the sun was out. The instructors had us descend on ropes, and we did our skills one buddy team at a time while everybody else waited on the surface.
When I did my mask flood, I cleared it, opened my eyes and I couldn't tell if there was water in the mask or not, it was too dark to see anything.
When we did our hovering, our instructor placed the rope between him and us, to give us a point of reference... he was about 6 inches on the other side of the rope, and all I could see was his mask.
After we did our skills, our other diving was pretty well limited. There was absolutely no way to cheat on the compass skills, since you couldn't see a thing even only 6 feet down. I swam mine across the quarry on a north south line, and as I was swimming all the sudden it got dark... thinking that the wall might be getting close, I put out my hand and slowed down, and sure enough I eased right into the wall feeling it right as I saw it. I turned around, and my instructor was right there (I have no idea how he was trailing me in that visibility).
My other visibility story was when we did our shared air assent. I made the symbol (about a foot away from my buddy). He popped out his main regulator and put his secondary (Air2) in... I couldn't even see his regulator at all! I managed to find it after a few seconds, and up we we went.
Anyway, we completed the dives meeting all the qualifications and that was pretty well the end of my experience.
On the one hand, I wish I could have had a lot better visibility for doing the OW stuff, but on the other hand I think that by learning in horrible conditions it will make diving in better visibility a bit less of a challenge.
I am in Missouri, and we did our dives in a quarry. There were 10 of us at the start.
Dive 1 & 2 we did on Saturday (Yesterday). Visibility was about 10 feet. The first dive was the "tooling around" dive, we went to over the training platform, descended on a rope, and then went out with dive-masters to tour the eastern end of the quarry. We had our main instructor and 3 dive-masters (all of whom are certified instructors) for 10 students.
One of our members freaked out at the low visibility, and she went right back up and that was the end of it for her. Her husband stayed and my buddy and I "adopted" him since we now had an odd number of students.
During our surface interval, we trained on the usual surface skill (tired diver tow, etc.)
Dive 2 featured all the usual skills, everybody did fine. I had no troubles with equalization or anything else, it was all pretty strait forward, and we then did another tour of the quarry.
Saturday night, the area got 5+ inches of rain.
Today (Sunday) we did dives 3 and 4. We picked up a guy who just needed those two dives to complete his cert and our class was back to 10.
Visibility was... well... horrible. The water level of the quarry had raised nearly 3 feet, and visibility on the training platform (which they use to keep the students from stirring up muck on the bottom) was 1 to 2 feet depending on whether the sun was out. The instructors had us descend on ropes, and we did our skills one buddy team at a time while everybody else waited on the surface.
When I did my mask flood, I cleared it, opened my eyes and I couldn't tell if there was water in the mask or not, it was too dark to see anything.
When we did our hovering, our instructor placed the rope between him and us, to give us a point of reference... he was about 6 inches on the other side of the rope, and all I could see was his mask.
After we did our skills, our other diving was pretty well limited. There was absolutely no way to cheat on the compass skills, since you couldn't see a thing even only 6 feet down. I swam mine across the quarry on a north south line, and as I was swimming all the sudden it got dark... thinking that the wall might be getting close, I put out my hand and slowed down, and sure enough I eased right into the wall feeling it right as I saw it. I turned around, and my instructor was right there (I have no idea how he was trailing me in that visibility).
My other visibility story was when we did our shared air assent. I made the symbol (about a foot away from my buddy). He popped out his main regulator and put his secondary (Air2) in... I couldn't even see his regulator at all! I managed to find it after a few seconds, and up we we went.
Anyway, we completed the dives meeting all the qualifications and that was pretty well the end of my experience.
On the one hand, I wish I could have had a lot better visibility for doing the OW stuff, but on the other hand I think that by learning in horrible conditions it will make diving in better visibility a bit less of a challenge.
Go out and have fun now.
