My Venture into GUE - Another view

[Trace Malinowski]

You can strive to be perfect and then discover your perfection backfire.

Case in point, I was fortunate enough to have mostly consistent flat trim in my GUE classes. When cameras were in the water, buddies looked for opportunities to get me out of trim.

When I did my NSS-CDS cave class with John Orlowski, I thought his trim was not perfect because he was slightly knees down, but he dove with his knees together and fins flat at the center line of his profile. He told me this allowed him to see more vertical relief in front of him and his fins were never too high to contact the ceiling or create vortexes along the ceiling. In some smaller tunnels in class, I noticed my "perfect" trim placed my blades high enough to bump the ceiling and also put them in a position to create whirling vortexes that would spiral off the ceiling and stir up puffs of silt. But, wait! Wasn't this the very place that I was supposed to have perfect trim and finesse my modified frog kick?

I learned to adjust my trim, modify my mod frog to the point that my knees and thighs were together, and allow my trim to serve me by allowing me to see more cave, get my fins up and my head slightly down, or be horizontal.

I also learned caves are a lot more difficult to silt with propulsion than you think and a lot more easily silted by things you wouldn't think would create a problem.

"Trim is a tool," as a GUE instructor such as Bob Sherwood will tell students, but the feedback in a GUE-F class to develop the ability to to maintain 0° horizontal often creates an abnormal focus on trim and a strive for perfection that is unnecessary. It's admirable to want to perfect skills, but when the desire to perfect skills interferes with your enjoyment or hinders your ability to balance training, practice and experience, something is wrong.

As was said, some people really enjoy training. I love to train. I loved both lacrosse practice and lacrosse games - maybe even practice more and I love training for dives and diving. The problem new DIR divers have to overcome is understanding what is "good enough" for those who dislike training more than diving, and for those who strive to attain perfection by training, where the point of diminishing return lies.

For those of us who are instructors, the quality of our students can also represent us. Divers become swimming billboards of what others may hope to achieve. Instructors must be careful to not create an environment in which the procedures overshadow the goals of the procedures and the desire students have to "look good" isn't exploited for the sake of making us look good.

 

[ucfdiver]

I was in the January class with Bob and Errol and I never really felt any tension or anxiety from anyone in that class. We were a lot smaller (3 people with a 4th thrown in on the check dive) so maybe that made a difference. I went in with the mindset that I'm just going to learn and if I pass, it's a bonus.

I'm sure there was some level of anxiety in everyone but it didn't really come out at all. At least I didn't see it. Each day, no matter where we screwed up, we were joking and laughing at lunch and dinner.

We were just either all laid back or hid things really well. Maybe a mixture of both. Compartmentalization is important.

We all ended up with provisionals out of silly mistakes on the check dive for which Bob offered a third dive to pass us all, but I was shivering, had a fever, and blown sinus from the first dive so we waited until the feb fundies to just do the check dive and we all passed. For this one, we students talked about the dive thoroughly beforehand with the main goal being not to let each other make stupid mistakes. As an example, while shooting the bag, my teammate reminded me to look up before letting it go...which I was about to forget.

This made us feel like we really had each other's backs rather than being anxious that we were alone or that one's screw ups were going to mess someone else up. It really felt like a team and what a feeling that was! I've never felt such support on a dive. It made it more relaxing and exciting at the same time. It's not just you doing the skill, it's you doing the skill with the support of 2 or 3 others watching you and making sure you're not losing trim or floating up or sinking, etc.

You guys had an extremely good group to be taking the class with. I dove with two of your teammates a few weeks ago, and neither seemed bothered by a rec pass, but happy they learned all that they did. I think one was too sick last week to do the reeval, and one got his tech pass.

 

[gitterdun]

When I did Fundies, I only had about 50-odd dives. I only had a few dives in a bp/w, and really didn't know much. I didn't go into the class, thinking that I had to pass (although, of course, I wanted to), but that I really wanted to learn. I think it was my 11th logged dive, that one of my buddies had an actual OOG, and sharing my nice, yellow octo was a royal pain in the arse.

It was from that day forward, that I decided to check out the whole "DIR" thing. The divers that I had just started to dive with had GUE training, and that long hose just made sense to me.

So.. in Fundies, my trimmed sucked, my buoyancy wasn't consistant, and I really needed alot of work. As some have said, I agree that alot of the pressure comes from within yourself.. and the desire to want to succeed. I really like what Lynne said, about the temperament of the divers that seek this type of training.

I ended up with a Rec provisional, upgraded to a pass a month later, then went for the Tech pass a year after that. Since then, I have done Tech 1, (T2 from another agency.. *shock horror*), Cave 1, Cave 2, and I have to say that I really did enjoy all of the courses. They did all vary in the fun:intensity ratio, but if you can teach yourself to just relax and learn, alot of the pressure is taken off. It is what it is, and if you can "chill" enough to take the important stuff with you, then nothing is lost (I am saying "you," in general). I do see GUE T2 in my future as well.

I wish you luck in your future diving, and if you're ever in our part of the Great White North, please give me a shout. We'd love to go for a dive with you.

If you think that we dont' have fun, have a look at the We Go Down videos, our "Sanked 'Em" parody, or even a gander at my Bloggy Thing. We're nuts...

 

[danvolker]

You can strive to be perfect and then discover your perfection backfire.

Case in point, I was fortunate enough to have mostly consistent flat trim in my GUE classes. When cameras were in the water, buddies looked for opportunities to get me out of trim.

When I did my NSS-CDS cave class with John Orlowski, I thought his trim was not perfect because he was slightly knees down, but he dove with his knees together and fins flat at the center line of his profile. He told me this allowed him to see more vertical relief in front of him and his fins were never too high to contact the ceiling or create vortexes along the ceiling. In some smaller tunnels in class, I noticed my "perfect" trim placed my blades high enough to bump the ceiling and also put them in a position to create whirling vortexes that would spiral off the ceiling and stir up puffs of silt. But, wait! Wasn't this the very place that I was supposed to have perfect trim and finesse my modified frog kick?

I learned to adjust my trim, modify my mod frog to the point that my knees and thighs were together, and allow my trim to serve me by allowing me to see more cave, get my fins up and my head slightly down, or be horizontal.

I also learned caves are a lot more difficult to silt with propulsion than you think and a lot more easily silted by things you wouldn't think would create a problem.

"Trim is a tool," as a GUE instructor such as Bob Sherwood will tell students, but the feedback in a GUE-F class to develop the ability to to maintain 0° horizontal often creates an abnormal focus on trim and a strive for perfection that is unnecessary. It's admirable to want to perfect skills, but when the desire to perfect skills interferes with your enjoyment or hinders your ability to balance training, practice and experience, something is wrong.

As was said, some people really enjoy training. I love to train. I loved both lacrosse practice and lacrosse games - maybe even practice more and I love training for dives and diving. The problem new DIR divers have to overcome is understanding what is "good enough" for those who dislike training more than diving, and for those who strive to attain perfection by training, where the point of diminishing return lies.

For those of us who are instructors, the quality of our students can also represent us. Divers become swimming billboards of what others may hope to achieve. Instructors must be careful to not create an environment in which the procedures overshadow the goals of the procedures and the desire students have to "look good" isn't exploited for the sake of making us look good.

Good perspective!

In my way of thinking, the fundies class gets you a skill set that will become "involuntary", much like breathing while your asleep, over time.....for some this may take a few weeks after fundies, for others a few months, but the bottom line is that once these skills are "just how you swim around", diving gets to be a lot more fun for you.

The Group that had already passed fundies and was diving with us Thursday through Sunday, spent a little time on thursday getting their team set up, and "getting use to the team positions in a big drift current, open ocean environment".
They got very comfortable, very quickly.....
As to the amount of fun, I shot videos every day of the dives ( thursday-Sun).
I am encoding a video of the Sunday dive right now, for youtube....When you look at this video, you will see team groups of divers, caught up in the moment of all the marine life around them, and having a blast. They enjoyed some very big dives, and with the doubles really got to cover alot of reef and wreck before having to head up.
I should be able to post a link for this in the next few hours.

 

[lamont]

- most GUE diving is highly non-stressful and fun. its mostly fundamental students who stress out constantly. when you do drill you should try to drill well and give feedback to each other about your buoyancy window and everything ("practice makes permanent, perfect practice makes perfect"), but its only fundamentals students who practice constantly on every dive and analyze absolutely everything to death.

Another thing about GUE diving is that sometimes you want to have frank debriefs and that isn't a problem to be solved. If a dive really does go a bit sideways those issues need to get addressed.

After diving this way for awhile, that becomes a much less frequent occurrence. But particularly when you go on dives with people who haven't been through fundies yet, then a good strong debrief can help to fix all the issues that occurred on the dive. If you don't address them, then they'll just fester and having dives with issues all the time isn't very much fun.

Jax, you may have seen a dive that really needed a debrief, and there were a bunch of senior GUE folks and instructors around to help them out with it, and it would be foolish to not take advantage of all the input that could be used to fix problems.

 

[Jax]

I cannot say enough how impressed and delighted I am with the non-reactive, reasoned discussion herein. The feedback I am receiving is testament to the intelligent, deliberate thought from DIR Practitioners that made me look into Fundies in the first place.

 

[Jax]

I wish you luck in your future diving, and if you're ever in our part of the Great White North, please give me a shout. We'd love to go for a dive with you.

If you think that we dont' have fun, have a look at the We Go Down videos, our "Sanked 'Em" parody, or even a gander at my Bloggy Thing. We're nuts...

I loved your "Sanked 'Em"!!


You guys ARE nuts . . . . that overhead was ICE!!!!

 

[mikemill]

Another thing about GUE diving is that sometimes you want to have frank debriefs and that isn't a problem to be solved. If a dive really does go a bit sideways those issues need to get addressed.

After diving this way for awhile, that becomes a much less frequent occurrence. But particularly when you go on dives with people who haven't been through fundies yet, then a good strong debrief can help to fix all the issues that occurred on the dive. If you don't address them, then they'll just fester and having dives with issues all the time isn't very much fun.

Jax, you may have seen a dive that really needed a debrief, and there were a bunch of senior GUE folks and instructors around to help them out with it, and it would be foolish to not take advantage of all the input that could be used to fix problems.

I had a dive that went really bad and it was nice having some trusted people there that weren't on the dive there to help us talk it out. Not in only getting the facts out without "blaming" but also in figuring out how to avoid it in the future.

 

[TSandM]

Yeah - we had an "interesting" dive in Mexico, that resulted in quite a debrief. It was kind of funny that the role of the GUE instructor in the debrief was to keep telling us to stop trying to assign blame, and instead try to figure out what we could do to avoid having the same problem in the future

 

[Tortuga68]

I'm reminded of a Simpsons episode:

Homer: Marge, I'm feeling a lot of shame right now.
Marge: I'm hearing that you feel a lot of shame.
Homer: And I feel that you hear my shame.
Marge: I'm feeling annoyance and frustration, but also tolerance.
Homer: I feel validated by that.
Marge: Good! I'm glad we had this talk.
Homer: Me too.