Yesterday, we went out to attempt one of our premiere PNW dives, the wreck of the Diamond Knot. This day had been planned for over a month, and I'd read every account of diving it that I could find, and studied the diagrams, and planned our dive profile and deco and everything we needed.
We had a lot of work to do to get everything ready. Such a dive requires a lot of gear, and it all has to be inspected and checked to make sure it is working properly. When you driving 3 1/2 hours to dive, to a place where nobody is going to have any spare parts for anything you need, you have to take the time to make sure it's all good before you leave home.
We checked our lights, and all our regulators. I looked at our scooters, and found that, because of the way they'd been stored, the o-rings were dirty, so I took that all apart, cleaned the grooves and cleaned and regreased the o-rings. I checked the weights in the scooters, to make sure they were secure, and put the batteries in and checked the retaining rings. I put the scooters together and leak-tested them in the pool. The only thing I didn't do was run them, because I didn't want to store them with the batteries hooked up (they bleed power that way).
In the end, although the seas were flat and the wind wasn't bad, the reason I wasn't able to do the dive was because the trigger on my scooter was repeatedly sticking. It was the last straw in a long week of frustrations and barriers between me and this dive. We did 7 hours of driving, and over three hours travel on the boat, to and from the site, and four of the six of us dove, but I didn't (and Peter didn't get to, because I was his buddy).
Moral of the story: Check EVERYTHING. If there is a single function that might make or break a dive, be sure you know the status of that before you leave the house.
We had a lot of work to do to get everything ready. Such a dive requires a lot of gear, and it all has to be inspected and checked to make sure it is working properly. When you driving 3 1/2 hours to dive, to a place where nobody is going to have any spare parts for anything you need, you have to take the time to make sure it's all good before you leave home.
We checked our lights, and all our regulators. I looked at our scooters, and found that, because of the way they'd been stored, the o-rings were dirty, so I took that all apart, cleaned the grooves and cleaned and regreased the o-rings. I checked the weights in the scooters, to make sure they were secure, and put the batteries in and checked the retaining rings. I put the scooters together and leak-tested them in the pool. The only thing I didn't do was run them, because I didn't want to store them with the batteries hooked up (they bleed power that way).
In the end, although the seas were flat and the wind wasn't bad, the reason I wasn't able to do the dive was because the trigger on my scooter was repeatedly sticking. It was the last straw in a long week of frustrations and barriers between me and this dive. We did 7 hours of driving, and over three hours travel on the boat, to and from the site, and four of the six of us dove, but I didn't (and Peter didn't get to, because I was his buddy).
Moral of the story: Check EVERYTHING. If there is a single function that might make or break a dive, be sure you know the status of that before you leave the house.