I returned to town late Thursday night after a month of diving the gin-clear waters of Bloody Bay Wall in Little Cayman. I had an Advanced Open Water course scheduled for the weekend, but after I saw the swell model I started making telephone calls to try to talk the students into moving the class at least until the next weekend. Two of them beat me to the punch by asking to transfer into my March class; the other two were insistent that they wanted to do it this weekend. I told them in no uncertain terms what they could expect, and they still insisted on going ahead with it. After lengthy discussion with them Friday evening, I decided, "Why not?"
Saturday morning, the conditions at Breakwater were truly fearsome. It was about the worst conditions under which I have ever tried to teach a class. I bumped into Ericson Reduta (a.k.a. "Scubajunkee"), and Ericson took some video clips of the attempts at surf entries some people were making. I hope he finds a way to post them, because you will see that lots of gear was being sacrificed to Neptune in those early attempts Saturday morning. Thus I spent a lot of time with my two students thoroughly reviewing surf entry procedures, and I gave them a chance to study other people making poor entries and getting trashed because of it. Finally I took them in, and they did beautifully. With nary a mishap, we swam out and began dive #1 of the day. Visibility was not even 5', and the surge even at 35 fsw was fairly terrible. Ten minutes into dive one, one of my students demanded to come to the surface and declared that she just could not do it and she wanted to bail out. This was her first time ever diving cold water, even though she had about 60 dives logged in the tropics. We calmed her down, and finally she went back down for another go at it.
To make a long story short, we didn't finish dive #3 until 5:28 p.m. It was a brutal day of training, but these two students I had hung in there and refused to give up. One of the navigation exercises had to be repeated 3 times before she got it right, but in the end both students swam a 100' on-a-side square and came back to within 5' of the starting point. That was no mean feat, given the powerful surge.
Sunday I took them out to the Metridium Fields, down to about 75', and they were dazzled. It was only about 10' of visibility, but when you go very slowly and look closely you can still find lots of stuff to interest you. Both students were really pumped after that one. We then went out and toured the wall--visibility no more than 5'. However, I found some stands of Corynactus to show them, pointed out lots of crabs and sand dabs and coppers and blues, etc., and they had a ball. We sent hundreds of gobies scurrying into their holes, watched Orange Sea Cucumber feeding, etc. They both came back exulting over how gorgeous it all was! When we got back after the dive to finish up paperwork, I showed them some of the photos I've taken around here and let them browse one of Chuck Davis' photo books. They're now totally hooked on CA diving!
So this is why I teach diving. I think I had more fun this past weekend, even in the worst conditions imaginable, than I did diving that awesome wall off Little Cayman. And the reason it was so much fun is that I gained new converts to CA diving; they definitely "got it"!
Bruce
Saturday morning, the conditions at Breakwater were truly fearsome. It was about the worst conditions under which I have ever tried to teach a class. I bumped into Ericson Reduta (a.k.a. "Scubajunkee"), and Ericson took some video clips of the attempts at surf entries some people were making. I hope he finds a way to post them, because you will see that lots of gear was being sacrificed to Neptune in those early attempts Saturday morning. Thus I spent a lot of time with my two students thoroughly reviewing surf entry procedures, and I gave them a chance to study other people making poor entries and getting trashed because of it. Finally I took them in, and they did beautifully. With nary a mishap, we swam out and began dive #1 of the day. Visibility was not even 5', and the surge even at 35 fsw was fairly terrible. Ten minutes into dive one, one of my students demanded to come to the surface and declared that she just could not do it and she wanted to bail out. This was her first time ever diving cold water, even though she had about 60 dives logged in the tropics. We calmed her down, and finally she went back down for another go at it.
To make a long story short, we didn't finish dive #3 until 5:28 p.m. It was a brutal day of training, but these two students I had hung in there and refused to give up. One of the navigation exercises had to be repeated 3 times before she got it right, but in the end both students swam a 100' on-a-side square and came back to within 5' of the starting point. That was no mean feat, given the powerful surge.
Sunday I took them out to the Metridium Fields, down to about 75', and they were dazzled. It was only about 10' of visibility, but when you go very slowly and look closely you can still find lots of stuff to interest you. Both students were really pumped after that one. We then went out and toured the wall--visibility no more than 5'. However, I found some stands of Corynactus to show them, pointed out lots of crabs and sand dabs and coppers and blues, etc., and they had a ball. We sent hundreds of gobies scurrying into their holes, watched Orange Sea Cucumber feeding, etc. They both came back exulting over how gorgeous it all was! When we got back after the dive to finish up paperwork, I showed them some of the photos I've taken around here and let them browse one of Chuck Davis' photo books. They're now totally hooked on CA diving!
So this is why I teach diving. I think I had more fun this past weekend, even in the worst conditions imaginable, than I did diving that awesome wall off Little Cayman. And the reason it was so much fun is that I gained new converts to CA diving; they definitely "got it"!
Bruce
