Fundies on Monday!

[BluewaterSail]

If you use gear that you are familiar with, it will give you a better chance to concentrate on what the instructor wants to tell you. Take it step by step. That's my opinion, but then some people pick up new skills faster than I do.:sigh:
Keep in mind that I took multiple fundies, not having any significant in-the-water mentoring close to home through that period.

 

[ScoobaChef]

GUE Fundamentals with Liam Allen, Sydney, Australia - Day 1

instructor - Liam
instructor Candidate - George
Divers - Myself, James, Olivia

Pretty easy day to start off with. Got to the dive shop and headed straight into the classroom for orientation, lecture and theory. Covered the basic kicks and drills and discussed how we would be performing our six training dives then moved on to calculating our weighting for a balanced rig. As the only one in the class working towards a tech pass, there was some concern that without a drysuit I may be too negative, so tomorrow we'll see how bad it is. I may end up having to switch to a drysuit mid course -yikes-

After a quick break for lunch, we headed outside and went through our gear. Aside from a slightly misplaced boltsnap on my primary hose, I was fairly well sorted. James and Olivia had to replace hoses and add some bungee and snaplinks, but before you know it, we were all good to go.

Now comes land drills. We spent about an hour looking like demented tai chi students running through the basic 5 nice and slowly. I never thought using a boltsnap could be such an excruciating experience, but after significant coaching, i was able to get the right technique and could mostly clip off my primary without dislocating my shoulder.

After we were all feeling comfortable with the basics of the skills, we moved on to practical gas analysis and set up our gear for tomorrow morning. Then down to the beach for the dreaded swim test. I didn't embarass myself and that's all I'm sayin ;-).

To wrap it up, we used our SMB's for floats and practiced the 6 kicks in swimsuits only. It seemed really odd and awkward at first, but by only having your lower half in the water, you really had to pay a lot more attention to proper body positioning and keeping ur butt tightly clenched. I'll be interested to see how it translates to underwater.

All in all an easy day, but I'm pretty certain we'll make up for that tomorrow.

Stay tuned!

 

[Pullmyfinger]

Do it in a drysuit, IF you already dive one.
I don't see the point of not taking Fundamentals in a dry suit, if you have one and have dove it.
Why not incorporate it into your training?

Cheers,
Mitch

This is kinda a no brainer question, but is it worth the extra task loading of doing the class in a drysuit. I haven't used one before, but with twins and and a light, i'm a bit on the negative side of a balanced rig.

Which is the lesser of two evils?

 

[ScoobaChef]

Do it in a drysuit, IF you already dive one.
I don't see the point of not taking Fundamentals in a wet suit, if you have a dry suit, and have dove it.
Why not incorporate it into your training?

Cheers,
Mitch

Mitch. The IF is the issue. I have a drysuit on order but don't have any practice with it. Depending on how tomorrow's dive goes, Liam may have me make the switch and get some practice in before the next class. If not, I have some amazing access to GUE mentors and instructors to help me incorporate the drysuit into my diving.

 

[HenrikBP]

Thanks for the report. Sounds like you're all off to a good start.

 

[TSandM]

Can't you just switch tanks? Surely SOMEBODY has a set of Al80's around that you could borrow. It's much easier to balance a new set of doubles than to figure out a dry suit in the middle of the class.

 

[ScoobaChef]

Can't you just switch tanks? Surely SOMEBODY has a set of Al80's around that you could borrow. It's much easier to balance a new set of doubles than to figure out a dry suit in the middle of the class.

Sadly no, the standard twinset for us is 12l fabers. I've got about 30 dives with it in a 7mil and an ally plate, and I've swum(swam) it up from 30m with an empty wing with no trouble so it's not a gigantic issue yet. We'll see how it goes today when the camera comes out. :-D

 

[deadbilly]

For what it's worth, my drysuit was the entire reason I got a provisional when I took Fundies (well, more like a "delayed" rec-pass), and I had 50ish dives in the thing and thought I had it figured out. It's amazing how long it took me to realize that the reason I kept blowing through my 3m/10ft stops was that you can't dump a drysuit through your elbow. I'd second others' advice and say stick with what you know, provided you don't have any serious weighting issues (I'm surprised no one around there has a set of Al doubles).

 

[ScoobaChef]

Fundies Day 2

Here we are again, 8 am at DCB, gear in the truck and off to Camp Cove for our first two dives. Liam briefs us on the day's activities and we head into the water, staged team descent down to 6m and we swim over to the training area where a caveline grid is laid out for drills. We spent over an hour swimming in a square working on our flutter and frog kicks while Liam videos and offers corrections. I did much better holding my trim and buoyancy than i was expecting, but kept getting dinged for moving my knees too much and not flattening out my fins between kicks. Then it was back up so the other's could change tanks and time for what I thought was truly cruel and unusual punishment. . Practicing back kicks in 1m of water. Between the lack of depth and the surge, it felt like hell trying to maintain depth, trim and perform the kicks,but since it was just practice, it really paid off when we got back down to the grid for the next round of skills.

Dive 2 next, I need to soak my legs. Pain!!

---------- Post added April 9th, 2013 at 11:25 PM ----------

Ok, back to dive number 2.

Team descent back down to the grid and we performed the back kick, which I made a total mess of and the helicopter turns which aside from a bit of wobble, was otherwise spot on. After examining my boots, Liam suggested that my feet may be too buoyant which is why I couldn't straighten my legs out enough to set up for the back kick. I'm gonna change to a thinner set of booties and see if that helps out a bit.

Next up was individual sessions performing the 5 basic skills. Reg removal. Reg switch, s-drill, mask clearing and mask removal. Did fine on the reg removal and switching, but got stuffed up trying to clip off my primary because my d ring was set about an inch too low and I was doing an awkward chicken wing trying to get it on. S-drill went well to begin with, but when I was restowing, I got my spg tangled with my long hose. Try again and I got it. On to mask clearing, I inhaled too much before flooding and went up more than a metre before I completed the skill and on the mask removal, I did the exact opposite and planted my face firmly in the sand.

we took a 10 min break when an octopus decided to wander through our session and hovered in a circle watching it. Then the others ran through their skills and we called it a day and surfaced in the pouring rain to pack up and head back for lunch and the video debrief. I think I was rather surprised after reading the horror stories about other video reviews that mine was actually quite painless. A lot of this credit goes to Liam for coaching us well underwater and we were all pretty much aware of our errors going into it. While it was very critical, down to the smallest details, Liam kept it very positive and patiently explained all the things we needed to work on to improve.

After this we wrapped it up with some dive planning and decompression theory, cleaned up our gear and called it a day. My legs and ankles absolutely hate me right now, but I had such an amazing time and I can't wait till next week for the rest!

 

[ScoobaChef]

Sorry if my report isn't as detailed as it should be. Feel free to throw questions out there.