Well, continuing on from last week's report about doing the PADI Discover Tec, this week I took up the option the dive school offers to do an open water dive with full tec equipment.
I showed up at the dive site at Oostvoornsemeer at the horribly early time of 8am, but this site gets packed by 10am so it was at least good to get going before the crowd. The dive school was already there setting up equipment of every sort from rec sets for an open water course to rebreathers for some of the tec instructors. Unfortunately, it was pelting with rain and blowing a gale so the first step was to get into my drysuit before even starting to think about setting up any gear.
With that done, my instructor set up my double 12s and stage bottle and we discussed the dive plan and geared up. The plan was to make a dive to a platform at 24m and then return exploring the rest of the dive site - which meant spending most of the dive at around 14m. We would then to a simulated gas-switching decompression (though not actually incurring any deco time). We would ascend to 7m where the instructor would deploy a DSMB, wait 2 mins then ascend to 5m, switch to 50% nitrox and off-gas another 3 mins before surfacing.
The dive went well, it was good to see the 24m platform again which I'd not visited since a couple of years ago when I did my AOW deep dive at the same site - getting up early had paid off as the visibility was about 4m this time instead of the 40cm from my last dive there. Unfortunately there wasn't much life around to see - just a couple of shrimps around the platform but some nice diving if a little cold.
We swam back to an area where the bottom was around 12m and began the ascent. Everything went fairly smoothly, the instructor deployed the DSMB at 7m and we hung there for a couple of minutes then ascended to 5m. I then went through the NOTOX procedure and switched to my EAN-50 stage bottle. Around this point it was getting hard to hold 5m - I seemed to be level with the spool on the line but my guage was flitting between 3m and 5m - when the stop was complete and we surfaced I found out why. We were about 50m from shore and the high winds had whipped up metre high waves on the surface - a swim back with regulators in ensued.
All in all, another cool tec experience - hopefully I'll be starting the full DSAT Tec Level One course within the next month - maybe I'll learn how to handle deco stops when there are big waves on the surface...
I showed up at the dive site at Oostvoornsemeer at the horribly early time of 8am, but this site gets packed by 10am so it was at least good to get going before the crowd. The dive school was already there setting up equipment of every sort from rec sets for an open water course to rebreathers for some of the tec instructors. Unfortunately, it was pelting with rain and blowing a gale so the first step was to get into my drysuit before even starting to think about setting up any gear.
With that done, my instructor set up my double 12s and stage bottle and we discussed the dive plan and geared up. The plan was to make a dive to a platform at 24m and then return exploring the rest of the dive site - which meant spending most of the dive at around 14m. We would then to a simulated gas-switching decompression (though not actually incurring any deco time). We would ascend to 7m where the instructor would deploy a DSMB, wait 2 mins then ascend to 5m, switch to 50% nitrox and off-gas another 3 mins before surfacing.
The dive went well, it was good to see the 24m platform again which I'd not visited since a couple of years ago when I did my AOW deep dive at the same site - getting up early had paid off as the visibility was about 4m this time instead of the 40cm from my last dive there. Unfortunately there wasn't much life around to see - just a couple of shrimps around the platform but some nice diving if a little cold.
We swam back to an area where the bottom was around 12m and began the ascent. Everything went fairly smoothly, the instructor deployed the DSMB at 7m and we hung there for a couple of minutes then ascended to 5m. I then went through the NOTOX procedure and switched to my EAN-50 stage bottle. Around this point it was getting hard to hold 5m - I seemed to be level with the spool on the line but my guage was flitting between 3m and 5m - when the stop was complete and we surfaced I found out why. We were about 50m from shore and the high winds had whipped up metre high waves on the surface - a swim back with regulators in ensued.
All in all, another cool tec experience - hopefully I'll be starting the full DSAT Tec Level One course within the next month - maybe I'll learn how to handle deco stops when there are big waves on the surface...
