Dutch Springs compass bearings?

[ScottNY]

This is not a fast project you shouldn't do this many times in one day as its not safe to play "YO-YO"....but if you record your headings ........you'll have the whole quarry mapped in no time......good luck and have fun

Agree the yo-yo thing is bad, but if the goal is primarily compass navigation practice, there's really no need to descend past 10' - 15' maybe. Or even 5'. Of course, you still have to take care with ascent speed as always. After maybe running a couple of courses and getting some confidence, try them deeper. This way one could assess quickly how things are going and try to correct problems without wasting time, air and energy.

Scott

 

[scubadobadoo]

Hummmm......sounds like fun. I'll have to practice some of those nav runs. Another you can try is getting lined up directly in front of the school bus (you have to be in line with it) and set a reciprocol heading (don't recall the heading). You should hit the tail of the helicopter.

that's a good one and hard to miss as the heli is very large

 

[scubadobadoo]

Agree the yo-yo thing is bad, but if the goal is primarily compass navigation practice, there's really no need to descend past 10' - 15' maybe. Or even 5'. Of course, you still have to take care with ascent speed as always. After maybe running a couple of courses and getting some confidence, try them deeper. This way one could assess quickly how things are going and try to correct problems without wasting time, air and energy.

Scott

I have seen many newer divers attempt to navigate with a compass in mid water and fail miserably. Better for newer divers to do it on the bottom or at the surface.

 

[ScottNY]

I have seen many newer divers attempt to navigate with a compass in mid water and fail miserably. Better for newer divers to do it on the bottom or at the surface.

Good point. I was actually thinking about that after I posted. My original thought was it wouldn't be that hard to maintain depth as you'd be spending a lot of time looking at the gauge where the compass is likely located anyway. But that thought was maybe partly based on a potentially wrong assumption as to where others' have equipment located. And an ability to not potentially unsafely wavering up and down way too much if a newer diver is too focused on the nav task alone.

Still, the goal is to not have to bounce up and down to re-verify if someone starts really feeling they're way off course. I just wonder if there's a good way to try to avoid that. Maybe practice right along the rope to start. Then try to go below a rope and stay honest about keeping head down on compass and not look up at rope; with buddy looking out for you as you go. Buddy would allow navigating diver to make mistakes up to the point of losing vis on the rope. The negative to this might be there's an almost impossible tendency to cheat by looking at rope.

So another idea might be to pick something with 'safe failure boundaries'. For example, start at the northeast entry, surface swim out to the chopper. Descend. Navigate to the van. Even if you miss, you're going to hit the boat or a platform or one of their connecting ropes unless you're wayyyy off. Any rope you hit, go either north or east and this will take you to a known item. (Assuming you memorize the map or bring the map slate.) This way at least, you're highly unlikely to be headed out to nowhere, therefore more comfortable and less likely to feel compelled to surface.

Thoughts?

Scott

 

[WetFatCat]

Thanks for the bearings and ideas.
Personally I have no troubles with compass navigation itself, I used to do this at the land. The tricky part for me is to maintain depth and buoyancy together with direction. that's what I need to train.

Dmitriy.

 

[RiverRat]

that's a good one and hard to miss as the heli is very large

You'd be surprised I had a DM candidate do it and I don't know what happened but we ended up in the middle of the quarry somewhere. I don't think his prescription lenses helped any. Or he never really lined up properly when he set his compass. I think the hardest thing folks need to learn is to just trust the compass especially in blue water with no reference at all. And anything more that slight deviations and corrections can put you off target.

 

[ScottNY]

You'd be surprised I had a DM candidate do it and I don't know what happened but we ended up in the middle of the quarry somewhere. I don't think his prescription lenses helped any. Or he never really lined up properly when he set his compass. I think the hardest thing folks need to learn is to just trust the compass especially in blue water with no reference at all. And anything more that slight deviations and corrections can put you off target.

Someone with better math skills can figure this out properly and confirm, but a quick rough try at this tells me that, assuming you want to go about 250' stright ahead, (is that about how far the chopper is from the shore?), if you're about 5 deg. off, that's going to be about 20' off target. 10 deg off would be more than 40' off target. If vis is lower than 20' or so, it's easy to see how someone could miss. (Though ok, being consistently off by FIVE degrees or more is a lot.)

Scott

 

[scubadobadoo]

Thanks for the bearings and ideas.
Personally I have no troubles with compass navigation itself, I used to do this at the land. The tricky part for me is to maintain depth and buoyancy together with direction. that's what I need to train.

Dmitriy.

That is what a dive buddy is for. It should be your dive buddy's job to double check the depth, theoretically, although if you dive solo then that's another story. It is really hard to navigate in low viz and in mid water at the same time as you will have no reference other than your computer. I have watched even really advanced divers with several hundred dives fail at mid water navigation. Many just end up on the bottom anyways when the viz is low, especially in cold water gear. Even if you have great land compass skills, I would still practice water compass skills on the bottom or at the surface first for a few tries and then try it in the water column after, at about 15 ft. Good luck and have fun.

 

[FrankF]

If you take a about a 120 heading and swim about 100 miles you will find the coolest attraction I have ever seen.

 

[piikki]

Thanks.
I'd like to get to helicopter from the plane or to track from the tanker. Of course I may surface, get bearing an dive again but if anybody knows bearing it could help to make this easier.
I gonna make a table with object to object directions.

Try to do the helicopter from the tanker! Oh, it wasn’t supposed to be hard at all but then the monster-telephone pole nearly ate me, and I got totally spooked out!!! :11: I will have to go look for it again, is there a road down there? I was not staying to check last time, that thing got me by surprise in poor viz. (We were doing a mid-water nav practice in 45ft, and I tell you, it wanted me, and I went from flat to vertical in 0.0001s).

Quarry is great for nav, can’t get too lost but always seem to get lost anyway. Keeps you humble. I switched to wrist compass recently, and I think I have deteriorated as a result. I find it harder than my retractor that I could keep further from my body and smack-middle. Now I veer to left, and right leg being stronger it’s nearly like… where that firetruck appear there AGAIN! So, I need to return too. Can’t go on like this.