Thanks for the report!
My path to tech diving
- Thread starter jlcnuke
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OP
And.... I'm back! Yep, another course completed, so it seems like it's time to update this thread. I am now back home after completing my Full Cave course with Chris Brock (and Joerg Hess was along in prep for his instructor Institute coming up).
So, the first thing that was very different for this course was that we weren't doing nearly as many dives per day, in fact, only 2 per day (I think we did 3 most days during apprentice). Despite that, due to the much longer lengths of the dives, it was just as exhausting if not more so. There wasn't a whole lot of "new" information to learn for this course, as Chris went over most of the theory during our previous classes. The #1 thing I took away from the class, personally, was how easy it is to forget things you don't practice. I did over 50 non-class dives between the first course and this one, trying to practice most of the items, but something like "blind exits following the line" is just something that I never thought to practice, and it showed the first time we did it during the class. I was.... less than perfect lol. It was a strong reminder that skills you don't practice will deteriorate, so I'm planning to practice such items in the future a little more often.
Something else of great value I found during the course was that even when my buddy or I did something "acceptable" (i.e. within standards, accomplished without problems, etc.), Chris and Joerg would still take their experience and tell us how to do things better. I like it when I'm pushed to do things excellent, even if I'm already doing them okay or good, and both of them demonstrated that they didn't want to just put out "okay" cave divers at the end of a course so I appreciated that. Not that I'm an amazing cave diver at this point, but I'm continuing to get better thanks to the training and mentorship of those who are much better than I.
Chris has an open invitation for me to shadow classes for my level or below and I plan to take him up on that in the future to keep reminding myself of the basics and seeing how he teaches from a "not the student" perspective, so I can hopefully use some of his techniques in my own teaching in the future.
Overall, I'd highly recommend anyone looking for technical, especially overhead training consider giving Chris a call if you want to be challenged and pushed to be better.
For a "graduation dive", we did a stage dive out to Waterhole III at Peacock, which was pretty awesome. I'm looking forward to exploring more of the cave systems going forward.
So, the first thing that was very different for this course was that we weren't doing nearly as many dives per day, in fact, only 2 per day (I think we did 3 most days during apprentice). Despite that, due to the much longer lengths of the dives, it was just as exhausting if not more so. There wasn't a whole lot of "new" information to learn for this course, as Chris went over most of the theory during our previous classes. The #1 thing I took away from the class, personally, was how easy it is to forget things you don't practice. I did over 50 non-class dives between the first course and this one, trying to practice most of the items, but something like "blind exits following the line" is just something that I never thought to practice, and it showed the first time we did it during the class. I was.... less than perfect lol. It was a strong reminder that skills you don't practice will deteriorate, so I'm planning to practice such items in the future a little more often.
Something else of great value I found during the course was that even when my buddy or I did something "acceptable" (i.e. within standards, accomplished without problems, etc.), Chris and Joerg would still take their experience and tell us how to do things better. I like it when I'm pushed to do things excellent, even if I'm already doing them okay or good, and both of them demonstrated that they didn't want to just put out "okay" cave divers at the end of a course so I appreciated that. Not that I'm an amazing cave diver at this point, but I'm continuing to get better thanks to the training and mentorship of those who are much better than I.
Chris has an open invitation for me to shadow classes for my level or below and I plan to take him up on that in the future to keep reminding myself of the basics and seeing how he teaches from a "not the student" perspective, so I can hopefully use some of his techniques in my own teaching in the future.
Overall, I'd highly recommend anyone looking for technical, especially overhead training consider giving Chris a call if you want to be challenged and pushed to be better.
For a "graduation dive", we did a stage dive out to Waterhole III at Peacock, which was pretty awesome. I'm looking forward to exploring more of the cave systems going forward.
nice story.
RDF in CA
Registered
Cool, thanks.
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