austinspace
Contributor
Two very full days of Cavern Diving training in North Florida under Johnny Richards. A very experienced and very excellent instructor. Very highly recommend his class to anyone that might be interested. It was just one other student and myself in a buddy team, so the course was very hands on (course is done with 3 students at most). Most of the open water drills were done at Ginnie Springs in the open water and in the cavern itself. With a final dive Sunday at Devil's ear a few hundred yards down. That was great: head-first penetration pulling our way through the flow from this spring then down and into the cavern.
There was a LOT of information to absorb, and now there's a LOT of practicing I need to do before I would feel ready to take Intro to Cave. But good to have something to shoot for. Like most advanced dive training, this course helped to reinforce and feel more comfortable with things I had learned before - for example, I did more air-share drills this weekend than ever before, as they're performed before each dive. But to really absorb the new material: reel work, following a line in zero-visibility while air-sharing, complex problem solving drills, etc., will still require a lot of practice. So whether or not I pursue further training in cave diving, I believe this course certainly has made me a little bit better/safer open water diver.
Johnny recommended wearing a 7mm farmer john, which I thought would be overkill in the warm air temps and water temp the same 72F I'm used to at Aquarena. But I took his advice, rented a suit, and found it to be very wise advice. It gets chilly after a while! Also added a 7' long hose to my configuration for the course - which while perhaps a bit cumbersome, at first anyway, really just makes a lot of sense for open-water too.
There was a LOT of information to absorb, and now there's a LOT of practicing I need to do before I would feel ready to take Intro to Cave. But good to have something to shoot for. Like most advanced dive training, this course helped to reinforce and feel more comfortable with things I had learned before - for example, I did more air-share drills this weekend than ever before, as they're performed before each dive. But to really absorb the new material: reel work, following a line in zero-visibility while air-sharing, complex problem solving drills, etc., will still require a lot of practice. So whether or not I pursue further training in cave diving, I believe this course certainly has made me a little bit better/safer open water diver.
Johnny recommended wearing a 7mm farmer john, which I thought would be overkill in the warm air temps and water temp the same 72F I'm used to at Aquarena. But I took his advice, rented a suit, and found it to be very wise advice. It gets chilly after a while! Also added a 7' long hose to my configuration for the course - which while perhaps a bit cumbersome, at first anyway, really just makes a lot of sense for open-water too.
