Line skills

[InTheDrink]

Boy, your instructor is gonna have a ball with you.

:cool2:

Prepare to be humbled.

:cool2:

Is there any way to say without sounding like a complete cock "Bring it On!".

I appreciate that taking multiple single lines from my posts to present a comprehensive 'this guy's waiting for a fall' post is pretty easy.

Did you consider taking single lines from all the posts about trim and buoyancy that I clearly wasn't asking about? Just to balance your argument??

Anyways. I am prepared to be humbled. I am mediocre and know that in the midst of the people on this thread am essentially like a child. I even feel embarrassed saying what I can do cos maybe next time I can't. But I'm pretty comfy in the water and I'm well up for being brought up to speed and learning more. Please don't confuse my confidence with arrogance.

J

 

[InTheDrink]

You'll likely want to be dry, not wet.

Wouldn't be uncommon for you to spend several hours straight in the water. You might do an hour's worth of open water stuff, then debrief right there in the spring, then do some more open water stuff, a little more debriefing, etc. I had two cavern dives where we did OW line and propulsion stuff, then a cavern dive, did our surface interval in the spring debriefing. Did our second dive plan in the spring, then did the dive, then debriefed in the spring. 2+ hours in the water.

Well here's where you can legitimately go to town on me. I'm diving dry for the first time next week. I'll be then working on diving doubles.

So I've clearly got a lot to learn, I was never saying I haven't.

J

 

[InTheDrink]

A tip I got from a friend: When you are putting in a tie, make sure you are neutral; do not adjust your buoyancy with your breath. It does horrible things to your gas consumption, and also makes you unstable, because if you get distracted, you'll change what you're doing with your breathing and lose precise buoyancy control. And instructors DO distract one . . .

Slack line kills for several reasons. It's hard to follow, and it's easy to pull off the ties. And it gets caught in fins and manifolds, and if you're following line in touch contact, you can't see to unwind yourself or your buddy.

In my first line-running class, we did an exercise where we ran line for 15 minutes. We then turned, and as a team of three, went lights-out. THIRTY EIGHT minutes later, the instructors called the drill, after we had pulled off a tie, created a huge loop, and managed to wrap it completely around Peter's manifold. In a cave, we would have died. It was a sobering experience. Taut line; secure tie-offs, AND line routed so that it can be followed in zero viz, are survival things.

Hi TSandM. I'm sorry but your posts are too absorbing and just create more questions for me. Feel free to ignore.


#1 - not using breathing for buoyancy control. This would be very alien to me. Why would using breathing to control buoyancy be inappropriate? In fact I don't really understand the proposition. I woul normally always have my BCD or wing at the right buoyancy at whatever depth. Everything outside of that is my lungs. I wouldn't even know where to start to remove that variable. What am I missing?????

#2 - thanks for the insight into why alack line is a problem. Much as I suspected but always good to get confirmation.

#3 - this is my most interesting point, for me at least. Tech divers bang on constantly about redundancy. But laying line seems to be a singular affair. How so? What happens if a tie slips off or slices?

Thx,
J

 

[Dive-aholic]

Hi TSandM. I'm sorry but your posts are too absorbing and just create more questions for me. Feel free to ignore.


#1 - not using breathing for buoyancy control. This would be very alien to me. Why would using breathing to control buoyancy be inappropriate? In fact I don't really understand the proposition. I woul normally always have my BCD or wing at the right buoyancy at whatever depth. Everything outside of that is my lungs. I wouldn't even know where to start to remove that variable. What am I missing?????

If this is truly the case, then you need to forget about reel work and learn how to really control your buoyancy. Caverns and caves do not give you square profiles. It's not a matter of dropping down, getting your wing filled for the depth and swimming. You will be changing your depth constantly, even if only by a few feet. This tends to be especially true during the beginning of the dive and you're working the reel. Both your hands may be busy with line placements and you may need to adjust your buoyancy slightly, yet you won't be able to free up a hand to do it. Breath controlled buoyancy is a necessity. You haven't even come close to mastering buoyancy if you're not controlling it through breathing.

 

[Sas]

If this is truly the case, then you need to forget about reel work and learn how to really control your buoyancy. Caverns and caves do not give you square profiles. It's not a matter of dropping down, getting your wing filled for the depth and swimming. You will be changing your depth constantly, even if only by a few feet. This tends to be especially true during the beginning of the dive and you're working the reel. Both your hands may be busy with line placements and you may need to adjust your buoyancy slightly, yet you won't be able to free up a hand to do it. Breath controlled buoyancy is a necessity. You haven't even come close to mastering buoyancy if you're not controlling it through breathing.

I think he was saying the complete opposite. I remember TSandM giving me that tip too recently yet I'm still to try it out - not using my breath to control position when laying line.

 

[TSandM]

What Kevin's tip to me was, was NOT to use my breath while putting in a tie -- as I'm approaching the spot where I want to put the tie in, or tie in a reel, or whatever, adjust my buoyancy with wing or suit so that I can breathe quietly at normal volume while I'm doing the tie. I had a tendency to come up to the tie and adjust buoyancy by either breathing at the top or bottom of my lungs, whichever was necessary. I wasn't uncomfortable doing it, because I use my breath for buoyancy control without thinking about it nowadays, but two things happened . . . it raised my gas consumption, AND if I got distracted, I'd forget where I was breathing and I'd lose the pinpoint buoyancy I wanted. Coming in and making an adjustment, I'm totally stable, and I use less gas.

And the other question is a good one . . . although we take pains to provide redundancy on anything we really need, we don't have a redundant line (and it's not very possible, really). Which is one of the reasons why studying the cave is so important -- looking around and thinking about the size and shape of the passage, the character of the formations, the composition of the bottom, and noting any really unusual landmarks (as well as turning around and looking at them from the other side, because sometimes they're quite unrecognizable coming back). It's also why we need to be so careful with the line, not to get caught in it, not to pull on it, and to learn to follow it in the dark within leaning or pulling.

 

[InTheDrink]

What Kevin's tip to me was, was NOT to use my breath while putting in a tie -- as I'm approaching the spot where I want to put the tie in, or tie in a reel, or whatever, adjust my buoyancy with wing or suit so that I can breathe quietly at normal volume while I'm doing the tie. I had a tendency to come up to the tie and adjust buoyancy by either breathing at the top or bottom of my lungs, whichever was necessary. I wasn't uncomfortable doing it, because I use my breath for buoyancy control without thinking about it nowadays, but two things happened . . . it raised my gas consumption, AND if I got distracted, I'd forget where I was breathing and I'd lose the pinpoint buoyancy I wanted. Coming in and making an adjustment, I'm totally stable, and I use less gas.

And the other question is a good one . . . although we take pains to provide redundancy on anything we really need, we don't have a redundant line (and it's not very possible, really). Which is one of the reasons why studying the cave is so important -- looking around and thinking about the size and shape of the passage, the character of the formations, the composition of the bottom, and noting any really unusual landmarks (as well as turning around and looking at them from the other side, because sometimes they're quite unrecognizable coming back). It's also why we need to be so careful with the line, not to get caught in it, not to pull on it, and to learn to follow it in the dark within leaning or pulling.

Hi Lynne,

Both your points make sense to me. I can see why manually adjusting for a particular depth would make sense for this kind of task. I'll give it a try. I guess I often do anyway when drilling things - beyond using lung control, getting me just right definitely makes it easier to avoid losing any control. I would imagine that I, if anything, would adjust slightly negative, which is fine in a pool but in a cave probably not the best approach.

Re: no redundancy on the line. Hmmm, this sounds like a significant single point of failure. Are line failures common (either tie-offs coming undone, line getting sliced, etc.)? I have a truly horrible sense of direction, I reckon I'll need to brush up on that more than anything. Perhaps now I understand a little better why the good reels are expensive!

Why is running two lines not possible by the way? Again, I can guess that entanglement, spacing between line, buddy/team separation issues might make it impractical but are there other reasons for not having this redundancy?

Cheers,
John

 

[InTheDrink]

If this is truly the case, then you need to forget about reel work and learn how to really control your buoyancy. Caverns and caves do not give you square profiles. It's not a matter of dropping down, getting your wing filled for the depth and swimming. You will be changing your depth constantly, even if only by a few feet. This tends to be especially true during the beginning of the dive and you're working the reel. Both your hands may be busy with line placements and you may need to adjust your buoyancy slightly, yet you won't be able to free up a hand to do it. Breath controlled buoyancy is a necessity. You haven't even come close to mastering buoyancy if you're not controlling it through breathing.

As per Sas' post, I was saying the exact opposite. I normally manage buoyancy with my breath. TSandM is suggesting that a manual adjustment for line tying can be beneficial.

Funnily enough when I read the start of your post I thought, oh ****, I really do need to start from scratch and learn to control buoyancy with those damned inflator things. Crikey. So my reading comprehension seems as good as yours (alternatively it could be that I am unclear in both my reading and writing)

J

 

[RJP]

Is there any way to say without sounding like a complete cock "Bring it On!".

Proverbs 16:18

:cool2:

 

[InTheDrink]

Proverbs 16:18

:cool2:

Never a truer word said!

[edit: see me back here in Fall, in the A&I section]