I finally finished a 3 month long adventure called IANTD Advanced Nitrox / Advanced Recreational Trimix. This class really stretched me, taught me a bunch of stuff, and opened up a whole new introduction into what I now know I dont know.
It all started with an instructor who was transferred to Spokane for two years, found me, and told me flat out that he was going to instruct me in these classes. I never asked, and in fact, it was never my goal to move into technical diving. He found me by doing a Google search, did a few dives with me, and then stated that I would take these classes from him so that he would have a buddy to dive with locally.
Uh okay.
We did some classroom sessions, but most of my education came from discussing the material during the long drives to the dive sites. We spent hours discussing gas management, the science of gasses under pressure, the math of decompression diving, formulas, equations, principals, what-ifs, equipment configurations, health and fitness, mental preparedness, proper attitude, problems, emergencies, dive planning, dive planning, dive planning everything.
He made me do math in my head until it hurt. When he actually allowed me to use a pencil and paper to calculate the formulas, it was so easy that it felt like cheating. No math answer was ever good enough without the why of it. My diving life became this strange mix of exact numbers and inflexible laws mixed with intangible and changeable fudge-factors. Decompression diving seemed to be a complicated mix of science and art.
We did drills.
Lots of them.
Every dive.
Mask drills, valve drills, OOG drills, no mask, no light, stage failure, lost gas, back-up tables, missing buddy (yes, he actually ran me under a log through the silt cloud he created and ditched me to see what Id do), blind diving, single breath runs to air share, drop stage, switch stage, lost fin, lot mask, lost everything. He disconnected hoses when I wasnt looking, turned off valves, stole gear from me and generally set me up multiple times on every dive. He likes to double up the drills, saying, Murphy always comes in pairs.
Did I mention, we did drills?
There were drills way outside of the standard requirements but Id better not go into that.
And of course, his favorite place to do all this stuff was at depth. Once he took off to 10 deeper than my training allows to see what Id do (I flashed him with my light, and when he didnt respond, went down after him, brought him back up and then signaled to change to the +5 +10 plan deco plan). I asked him if I did the right thing and he said, In a situation like this, only you can make that determination.
And we talked about it all until there was nothing to talk about. Why did I do this or that? What else should I have done? What options did I miss? Over and over
He made me swim 4 inches above the silty bottom while running a line, and for three weeks called me Capt. Silt.
We blew bags almost every dive from various depths. He insulted me, made fun of my skills, my intelligence (or lack of) until I thought there was no worse diver on the planet. But always with a twinkle in his eye. And to others he loudly sung praises of me.
His agreed that it was a smart thing that I had already taken DIRF. By starting out the class already using the correct gear, having the right skills (mainly kicks, buoyancy and trim) and the proper mindset, he was able to really focus my training on the decompression/gas skills that some students aren't able to because of the required teaching time spent on the basics.
I also became his tank monkey. I hauled singles and doubles and stages and suit gas bottles. I drove 30 miles to his house, picked up the O2 and HE bottles, switched them out at the air company, drove them back, set them back up in his garage, stood around watching him mix, hauled the tanks to the dive shop for topping, drove them back, unloaded them in his garage. I analyzed, marked tanks, re-analyzed, did some more math just for fun, analyzed again. I filled out forms on PPO2, CNS%, END, EAD, MOD, TOD, SAC, RMV, FO2, UPTDs and a million other things. And always the questions Why? What if? What else?
One time at the dive site he mentioned how little sleep hed gotten the night before. I said, lets call the dive. No thanks, he said. I think he was just seeing if you would offer. Everything is training and testing with him.
He made me buy the lattes. He made me buy the gas, and the gas.
He gave me gear, or sold it too me too cheap (it was funny to hear us argue about that). He said his gear is my gear. He bought a boat for us to dive off of and told me to use it any time.
He hated my big Tupperware gear tub, said no decent New Jersey (where hes from) diver would be caught dead with one. So he bought me a milk crate. DIR black, he said with a snicker. And he pasted two DIR stickers on it, which cracks him up to no end. Hes always making fun of DIR and calling me Mister DIR and stuff. I called him a stoke. We enjoy the banter, but his respect for the DIR skills is obvious.
It seems like I spend hours planning dives. He makes me do it long hand, and I tell him, thats why God invented V Planner. He said that tables were for checking your math.
The maddest my wife ever got at me was after the first written test (the Advanced Nitrox test). My instructor emailed it to me, saying, This test is too easy for you, so below Ive added four questions.
Thanks a lot. I breezed through the test, sure that I had gotten 100%. When I got the results, and discovered that Id missed 3 questions and scored a 94% I was furious. How had I been so stupid! One of the questions was worded poorly, I insisted to my wife. The other two prove how stupid I am.
She shook her finger at me saying, Ive never even gotten 94% on any test! What are you freaking out about?
I should have gotten them all right.
You need help, she said, marching off to bed.
My instructors comment was, After two months of going over this stuff, youd think youd know the material by now.
A week later I took the Advanced Recreational Trimix test. I scored 100%.
Thats better.
On the last dive, we drove 70 miles to the site. We ate and talked and planned future dives ones where hes no longer my instructor and we just dive, no drills (I dont think he can do it). We talked about the next class I should take. He talks a lot about his rebreather cave dives in FL. About his dives off the Seeker in the old days.
We got to the site and took our time suiting up. Everything with him is nice and slow. We did an easy surface swim to the wall and dropped down to 150. The wall has spectacular structure, with granite slabs that jut out and look almost prehistoric. The vis was a good fifty feet and watching our HIDs beam down toward the bottom, which rests at 850, is amazing. Floating along that wall with 150 of dark above you and 700 of black below you is like drifting in space. There is no current, so a simple, single frog kick launches well along the walls length. The HE makes the mind nice and sharp, and everything is calm, clear and in focus.
My instructor points to his backup 2nd stage, and I see that two small streams of pea-sized bubbles are coming from the mouthpiece. I adjust it, but the flow continues. He wraps on it hard a couple of times, but it keeps bubbling. He has now drifted down to 155 5 below the planned max depth, so I signal him to come back up, which he does.
I am leading this dive, so he gives me the well? shrug for me to decide if we call it or continue the dive. The bubbles are small, but I consider their size 5ata up from there. What is the cause (IP?)? Could the reg go full freeflow? My buddy needs to always have enough gas for both of us to get shallow enough to go to our stages. I think about our turn pressure and a hundred other things. I am thankful for the HE.
I signal for us to continue the dive, and I plan to keep a good eye on his reg and his pressure. He signals back OK, and we move along. Pretty soon he turns off our HIDs and we both finish the dive on my small backup light. There are no other drills deep this dive, which I assume was due to the reg issue. Still, I am always ready for him to pull something.
After 20 mins we head back up and switch to our stages. During deco he has me do valve and lost fin drills, and thats it. Easy dive.
As were heading back in, he signals us to go to the left. I am leading, so I signal, no, to the right. He insists, to the left. Fine, I shrug. Whatever.
As usual, we take forever after deco to get from 15 to the surface. But this time I stay at the 8 bottom. I watch him go up, look around, then come back down. I signal to him the direction I had wanted to go sure that he had overshot the exit point. He flips me the finger, and we head back the way Id originally said, and I am laughing out loud. I cant remember having this much fun.
With the correct (conservative) deco, I find myself less tired after these deep dives than I was after even normal recreational dives. And now I understand why. I really love the mental part of technical diving (and it really is mostly mental), plus all the cool gear. Still, I did a dive with some friends last Tuesday to 30 and had a blast.
My instructor is in New York right now finishing up his requirements to teach full trimix. Im glad to finally be certified so he can go back to his CCRB and quit whining about OC.
Bottom line, the class was excellent. The IANTD material is somewhat piecemeal and random. But to get the intense, one-on-one instruction was a blessing I cannot be thankful enough for.
It all started with an instructor who was transferred to Spokane for two years, found me, and told me flat out that he was going to instruct me in these classes. I never asked, and in fact, it was never my goal to move into technical diving. He found me by doing a Google search, did a few dives with me, and then stated that I would take these classes from him so that he would have a buddy to dive with locally.
Uh okay.
We did some classroom sessions, but most of my education came from discussing the material during the long drives to the dive sites. We spent hours discussing gas management, the science of gasses under pressure, the math of decompression diving, formulas, equations, principals, what-ifs, equipment configurations, health and fitness, mental preparedness, proper attitude, problems, emergencies, dive planning, dive planning, dive planning everything.
He made me do math in my head until it hurt. When he actually allowed me to use a pencil and paper to calculate the formulas, it was so easy that it felt like cheating. No math answer was ever good enough without the why of it. My diving life became this strange mix of exact numbers and inflexible laws mixed with intangible and changeable fudge-factors. Decompression diving seemed to be a complicated mix of science and art.
We did drills.
Lots of them.
Every dive.
Mask drills, valve drills, OOG drills, no mask, no light, stage failure, lost gas, back-up tables, missing buddy (yes, he actually ran me under a log through the silt cloud he created and ditched me to see what Id do), blind diving, single breath runs to air share, drop stage, switch stage, lost fin, lot mask, lost everything. He disconnected hoses when I wasnt looking, turned off valves, stole gear from me and generally set me up multiple times on every dive. He likes to double up the drills, saying, Murphy always comes in pairs.
Did I mention, we did drills?
There were drills way outside of the standard requirements but Id better not go into that.
And of course, his favorite place to do all this stuff was at depth. Once he took off to 10 deeper than my training allows to see what Id do (I flashed him with my light, and when he didnt respond, went down after him, brought him back up and then signaled to change to the +5 +10 plan deco plan). I asked him if I did the right thing and he said, In a situation like this, only you can make that determination.
And we talked about it all until there was nothing to talk about. Why did I do this or that? What else should I have done? What options did I miss? Over and over
He made me swim 4 inches above the silty bottom while running a line, and for three weeks called me Capt. Silt.
We blew bags almost every dive from various depths. He insulted me, made fun of my skills, my intelligence (or lack of) until I thought there was no worse diver on the planet. But always with a twinkle in his eye. And to others he loudly sung praises of me.
His agreed that it was a smart thing that I had already taken DIRF. By starting out the class already using the correct gear, having the right skills (mainly kicks, buoyancy and trim) and the proper mindset, he was able to really focus my training on the decompression/gas skills that some students aren't able to because of the required teaching time spent on the basics.
I also became his tank monkey. I hauled singles and doubles and stages and suit gas bottles. I drove 30 miles to his house, picked up the O2 and HE bottles, switched them out at the air company, drove them back, set them back up in his garage, stood around watching him mix, hauled the tanks to the dive shop for topping, drove them back, unloaded them in his garage. I analyzed, marked tanks, re-analyzed, did some more math just for fun, analyzed again. I filled out forms on PPO2, CNS%, END, EAD, MOD, TOD, SAC, RMV, FO2, UPTDs and a million other things. And always the questions Why? What if? What else?
One time at the dive site he mentioned how little sleep hed gotten the night before. I said, lets call the dive. No thanks, he said. I think he was just seeing if you would offer. Everything is training and testing with him.
He made me buy the lattes. He made me buy the gas, and the gas.
He gave me gear, or sold it too me too cheap (it was funny to hear us argue about that). He said his gear is my gear. He bought a boat for us to dive off of and told me to use it any time.
He hated my big Tupperware gear tub, said no decent New Jersey (where hes from) diver would be caught dead with one. So he bought me a milk crate. DIR black, he said with a snicker. And he pasted two DIR stickers on it, which cracks him up to no end. Hes always making fun of DIR and calling me Mister DIR and stuff. I called him a stoke. We enjoy the banter, but his respect for the DIR skills is obvious.
It seems like I spend hours planning dives. He makes me do it long hand, and I tell him, thats why God invented V Planner. He said that tables were for checking your math.
The maddest my wife ever got at me was after the first written test (the Advanced Nitrox test). My instructor emailed it to me, saying, This test is too easy for you, so below Ive added four questions.
Thanks a lot. I breezed through the test, sure that I had gotten 100%. When I got the results, and discovered that Id missed 3 questions and scored a 94% I was furious. How had I been so stupid! One of the questions was worded poorly, I insisted to my wife. The other two prove how stupid I am.
She shook her finger at me saying, Ive never even gotten 94% on any test! What are you freaking out about?
I should have gotten them all right.
You need help, she said, marching off to bed.
My instructors comment was, After two months of going over this stuff, youd think youd know the material by now.
A week later I took the Advanced Recreational Trimix test. I scored 100%.
Thats better.
On the last dive, we drove 70 miles to the site. We ate and talked and planned future dives ones where hes no longer my instructor and we just dive, no drills (I dont think he can do it). We talked about the next class I should take. He talks a lot about his rebreather cave dives in FL. About his dives off the Seeker in the old days.
We got to the site and took our time suiting up. Everything with him is nice and slow. We did an easy surface swim to the wall and dropped down to 150. The wall has spectacular structure, with granite slabs that jut out and look almost prehistoric. The vis was a good fifty feet and watching our HIDs beam down toward the bottom, which rests at 850, is amazing. Floating along that wall with 150 of dark above you and 700 of black below you is like drifting in space. There is no current, so a simple, single frog kick launches well along the walls length. The HE makes the mind nice and sharp, and everything is calm, clear and in focus.
My instructor points to his backup 2nd stage, and I see that two small streams of pea-sized bubbles are coming from the mouthpiece. I adjust it, but the flow continues. He wraps on it hard a couple of times, but it keeps bubbling. He has now drifted down to 155 5 below the planned max depth, so I signal him to come back up, which he does.
I am leading this dive, so he gives me the well? shrug for me to decide if we call it or continue the dive. The bubbles are small, but I consider their size 5ata up from there. What is the cause (IP?)? Could the reg go full freeflow? My buddy needs to always have enough gas for both of us to get shallow enough to go to our stages. I think about our turn pressure and a hundred other things. I am thankful for the HE.
I signal for us to continue the dive, and I plan to keep a good eye on his reg and his pressure. He signals back OK, and we move along. Pretty soon he turns off our HIDs and we both finish the dive on my small backup light. There are no other drills deep this dive, which I assume was due to the reg issue. Still, I am always ready for him to pull something.
After 20 mins we head back up and switch to our stages. During deco he has me do valve and lost fin drills, and thats it. Easy dive.
As were heading back in, he signals us to go to the left. I am leading, so I signal, no, to the right. He insists, to the left. Fine, I shrug. Whatever.
As usual, we take forever after deco to get from 15 to the surface. But this time I stay at the 8 bottom. I watch him go up, look around, then come back down. I signal to him the direction I had wanted to go sure that he had overshot the exit point. He flips me the finger, and we head back the way Id originally said, and I am laughing out loud. I cant remember having this much fun.
With the correct (conservative) deco, I find myself less tired after these deep dives than I was after even normal recreational dives. And now I understand why. I really love the mental part of technical diving (and it really is mostly mental), plus all the cool gear. Still, I did a dive with some friends last Tuesday to 30 and had a blast.
My instructor is in New York right now finishing up his requirements to teach full trimix. Im glad to finally be certified so he can go back to his CCRB and quit whining about OC.
Bottom line, the class was excellent. The IANTD material is somewhat piecemeal and random. But to get the intense, one-on-one instruction was a blessing I cannot be thankful enough for.
