A very challenging extension & practicum to Wrecks of what otherwise would've been a comprehensive Cavern/Cave Course. The advantage of Subic Bay is the variety and close easy access of sunken wrecks to train on: from a DC-10 fuselage at only 5m deep, where me and my two classmates spent an entire two hour dive just drilling on the basics of laying line, problem solving & gas-sharing egress and coming together as a team; to the El Capitan Wreck at 18-20m where we were introduced to the art of laying very long lengths of line --over two spools worth-- and where we performed a Night Dive, lights out gas-sharing egress drill over a major length of the main line (over 50 meters long: we made it out with my donor having only 10bar left in backgas --I had to share my gas with him for our Deco stops on ascent!:11: ); and finally the deep wrecks at over 30m like the USS New York (similar experience & orientation like the Yukon Wreck in San Diego --the ship is laying on its side with the portholes functioning like skylights) and the LST Wreck --where I experienced helping to pull line in a total silt-out (was like swimming around in ice tea with marmalade bits, in a long cylindrical passage restriction the size of a phonebooth! I didn't dare lose contact of the line on that one. . .)
My only criticism was that the Instructor didn't teach the form of deliberate touch-contact communication, common to a previous Wreck and Cavern Class that I took --instead we were just told just to stay in contact with the line, and feel for your teammate's push-on-your fins from behind signaling to move forward, and just keep moving as fast as possible. His argument was that touch contact egress as formally taught in Cave Classes is too slow & time-consuming. My counter-point was that an experienced and seasoned team can make it out almost as quickly, with less chance of losing one another or blundering onto the wrong line (and so I proceeded to show my two teammates the way my Cavern Instructor taught me). Well . . .it turns out both the Instructor and I had valid points since my teammates & I exited the El Capitan Wreck on a no-lights, gas-sharing egress drill with my donor only having 10bar left! The Lessons Learned are that you have to regularly practice this Drill with a dedicated 3-man team to gain efficiency, but even then, you've got to be aware there could come a time where you just might have to switch-over on donors. . .
There were no Gremlin Blue Hands of Death in this class, but Sam the Instructor did manage to arrange enough "situational overload" to confound us so as to learn from our mistakes. A couple of times as the lead Reel Man laying line, I would get too far ahead of my fellow teammates where either one of them "gets lost" (Lost Buddy Drill); or one would somehow have an "inflator hose leak" (resulting in Right Post Shutdown), and then the other team member soon afterwards "losing all his breathing gas" --Well, it turned out they had to actually Buddy Breathe for a few moments until they rounded a corner and caught sight of me up ahead (anyone wonder why now there's a breath-hold swim requirement in DIR-F?).
The only skill I had problems with was the Lost Line Drill, made more difficult because during both trials I managed to lose one or both of my contact lenses and never got an initial good look at the Main Line I was trying to find anyway. Consequently, my search patterns were woefully erratic and off-base ("Wow! Almost just like you really were lost!", as Sam later quipped). Took 20 minutes before I gave-up on my first attempt (18m deep at Night, in some cargo hold of the El Capitan), and 10 minutes before I luckily found it in a covered corridor on the LST (24m deep during the Daytime, but I had to close my eyes and was also accruing near max limits of my Deco Plan). A serious and grave situation to be in for real, and it really hit home with me because of my difficulties (I must've swam & finned head-on into every damn pipe and stanchion in that LST deck corridor before I snagged the Main Line :shakehead). It only took less than three minutes each for my teammates Dennis and Dave to complete the Drill.
And so in evaluation, this Course was a great summing-up Reinforcement and Lab Practical for all the previous overhead penetration classes I've had over this past year-and-a-half. Highly recommend Subic Bay as a venue for advanced Wreck Training through Instructor Sam Collett and the Tech Asia Dive Shop.
(GUE Cave 1??? --ain't no big thang! --bring it on Homeboyz! :no)
