Diving Lingo

[frontiernurse]

I’m a new diver. Got my open water cert near Puerto Vallarta (Sayulita-Marietas) in easy conditions in January. Live in Northern California. Dove in Monterey once and quickly appreciated how challenging diving can be, even though my Cali dive was in easy conditions (by NoCal standards). I kinda sucked. I scour the boards and frankly, I don’t know what the hell half of the posts mean.

I am in medicine and am used to being expected to look things up before asking for explanations. HOWEVER… I want diving to be fun, not work.

So… anyone want to translate for me?

What do the following terms mean:

-Trim
- Upwelling
- surge (how is this different from waves or wave height?)
- lift
- backplate
- wings
- backplate with wings
- fundies
- deco bottles
- UTD
- GUI
- tech pass
- negative/positive buoyancy of GEAR

There are about a million more terms that seem like latin to me, but lets start with this. If there are other important terms, especially concerning ocean conditions and dive skills (as opposed to gearhead jargon) that anyone thinks is relevant, please feel free to add to lexicon.

Thank you Scubaboard!!!

 

[frontiernurse]

I don't know how this post wound up on the NorCal board... I posted it on the "new to diving" section. Oh well. Be kind.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

I’m a new diver. Got my open water cert near Puerto Vallarta (Sayulita-Marietas) in easy conditions in January. Live in Northern California. Dove in Monterey once and quickly appreciated how challenging diving can be, even though my Cali dive was in easy conditions (by NoCal standards). I kinda sucked. I scour the boards and frankly, I don’t know what the hell half of the posts mean.

I am in medicine and am used to being expected to look things up before asking for explanations. HOWEVER… I want diving to be fun, not work.

So… anyone want to translate for me?

What do the following terms mean:

-Trim
- Upwelling
- surge (how is this different from waves or wave height?)
- lift
- backplate
- wings
- backplate with wings
- fundies
- deco bottles
- UTD
- GUI
- tech pass
- negative/positive buoyancy of GEAR

There are about a million more terms that seem like latin to me, but lets start with this. If there are other important terms, especially concerning ocean conditions and dive skills (as opposed to gearhead jargon) that anyone thinks is relevant, please feel free to add to lexicon.

Thank you Scubaboard!!!

I'd be glad to.

Trim: Refers to the body positioning one has in the water while "levetating" in the water column. In other words, as you are cruising along during a dive are you heads up, horizontal, or heads down in position in relation to the direction of travel.

Upwelling: Typically when the spring winds start up in April/ May in California (valleys heat up, hot air mass rises, causes coastal onshore winds to start up to replace displaced air in inland valleys). This causes lots of wind chop and swells in the ocean, which causes ice cold clear nutrient rich water to be pumped up from the depths from the Alaskan current bringing it to the top which can drop ocean surface temperatures sometimnes down into the lower 40's. After which when exposed to sunlight for a few days can cause the nutrients to bloom out into what's known as an algae bloom which can reduce visibility to darn near zero in a matter of hours. Great for filter feeding life, but bad for divers :depressed:

Surge:
The lateral movement of the water column (back and forth) caused by swells going by overhead.

Lift:
The air lift phenomenon or lift rating of a BCD (buoyancy control device).

Backplate:
A metal plate made out of stainless steel desinged to securely mount a scuba cylinder to, which also provides slots or openings to attach a harness to, to enable a diver to don the tank/plate and comfortably dive with a scuba cylinder on his/her back.

Wings:
The wing is the BC part that typically goes between the tank and plate and serves as the balast control at depth.

Backplate and wings:
Add both of the two upper entries together.

Fundies:
A class offered by the agency Global Underwater Explorers entitled DIR fundamentals.
DIR stands for "doing it right" and the fundies class is the fundamentals of diong it right.

Deco bottles:
These are scuba cylinders that are typically slung on the sides of divers (not on their backs) and are used for decompression during long ascents back to the surface.
Decompression bottles can contain various mixes of gases ranging from 50% oxygen to 100% pure oxygen to speed up the deco process and shorten the time a diver needs to stay at certain depths to complete decompression stops to avoid the bends.

UTD:
United Team Diving: A DIR style agency teaching DIR principles.

GUE:
Global Underwater Explorers, Also a DIR tech agency teaching DIR principles. The original DIR agency BTW.

Tech pass:
A certain rating given when taking a DIR fundamentals class. To be able to get a Tech One pass you have to do all the fundies class work in a set of doubles and the rigors are very stringent. Not many people are able to pass fundies with a tech one pass.
Getting a tech one pass means you can continue on to take more technical diving classes with GUE.

Negative or positively buoyant gear:
Some gear floats in the water and requires additional weight to offset it's inherent buoyancy, and some gear sinks which means weight can be removed from a weight belt to counter the negative weight of the gear. Divers seem to be in agreement that it's a good thing when gear is negatively buoyant and weight can be removed from a weight belt (or weight source). One thing that tends to be inherantly buoyant and always seems to be the object of ridicule is the over stuffed jacket style BCD. Many refer to them as "Poodle jackets" because when worn they tend to resemble the classic look of a poodle with the big poof of fur around the chest/middle area.

Hope this helps.

Note: I'm not DIR and I hope I got some of the DIR/GUE/UTD answers straight. Maybe one of you DIR's can verify for me?

Thanks

 

[Ben_ca]

Trim

Here's some of Don's articles on the concept of trim. He does such a good job of explaining anything I could possibly come up with would fall short

Linky

 

[kathydee]

Agreed! Don has such a great way with words .

Just to clarify: Swell basically refers to the rolling movement you see if you look at the ocean's surface, while surge refers to the back/fourth movement you feel from these same swells when diving underwater.

The below links should help you get a sense of UTD and GUE diving style.

You'll see plenty of deco bottles clipped off to the technical divers in the gue video clip.

Like ZKY said, "Fundies" is a class offered by GUE that teaches the basic diving skills that you will see in the GUE video clip (trim, propulsion, teamwork, dive planning, etc). There are two ways to pass Fundies either recreational or technical. The technical pass involves double cylinders, additional equipment/skills and is a prerequisite needed to progress into GUE tech training (technical and/or cave diving courses). Greater precision of skills is required to earn the Fundies technical pass. The goal is to assure a high level of underwater competency before engaging in training that leads to more demanding scuba environments (such as depths that require mandatory decompression time and/or overhead environments).

Often divers take Fundies as a stand alone class to gain new diving skills.

GUE: YouTube - GUE video

UTD: http://www.unifiedteamdiving.com/

You can just google "backplate and wing" and look at the images . The combo functions similar to a BCD, however there are many noticable differences.

 

[Jeepguy099]

Its ok frontier nurse, it took me a month or two to learn all that lingo myself... you've now got a head start

which leads me to my next question for all: when people are talking about gas mixes, they talk about and END in relation to depth... what does END mean?

Is it a ceiling beyond which the ppo2 of a particular mix is too low (opposite of MOD)?

 

[Ben_ca]

END

Equivalent Narcotic Depth is mainly applied to discussions on Nitrox/Trimix. When you add helium to the breathing gas the nitrogen in the mix is decreased... Less nitrogen, less narcosis. The calculations come you with a number that you should be able to relate to easily.

 

[rhlee]

END

Equivalent Narcotic Depth is mainly applied to discussions on Nitrox/Trimix. When you add helium to the breathing gas the nitrogen in the mix is decreased... Less nitrogen, less narcosis. The calculations come you with a number that you should be able to relate to easily.

Just a minor clarification to this; many (most? all?) agencies teach that oxygen is just as narcotic as nitrogen, and (as Ben mentioned) the only way to decrease END is by addition of helium to the breathing mix, thus displacing both oxygen and nitrogen.

The idea of END is to relate the narcotic potential of some trimix mixture back to air. i.e. the END of trimix 21/35 at 150' is 86' (about the same narcotic potential as 86' on air).

hope that helps.

 

[frontiernurse]

Thanks all. So what is downwelling?

 

[Cave Diver]

I don't know how this post wound up on the NorCal board... I posted it on the "new to diving" section. Oh well. Be kind.

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