DIR- GUE Post-Lockdown Swiss Fundies - Report in Episodes

[irycio]

A pretentious Fundies Report

S01E00: Pilot (Pre-Course)

It's January 2020, New Year's resolutions still have not been forgotten. After a dive-wise pretty decent for me 2019 I decide to take the Fundamentals. At that point I'm at around 90 dives, a happy recreational diver, albeit with bp/w and in his own mind comfy with a drysuit (kudos to people diving wet in Switzerland).
January 15 - signed up on a GUE website, course scheduled for mid-March followed by mid-May (since I was supposed to have a holiday trip during Easter break. Yeah, right...). Instructor: Jason Winters, newly certified Swiss GUE instructor.
Materials downloaded, read; worksheets solved. Going diving regularly in my single tank, although I'm to take the course in doubles. It's just two bottles instead of 1, what could go wrong?

---Coronavirus break---

Due to lockdown measures, course cannot take place. Rescheduled for May 23/24 followed by June 13/14.

May 15: My buddy cancels.

May 16: Jason finds a new buddy for me. He's been diving since 1984, teaching for the last 30 years, including CCR/DPV in caves. Also leads Swiss cave diving section of CMAS.

It's good, I think Jason is now under more pressure than I am.

May 17, 10:00: Wait, there will be some swimming test. Swimming pools closed, let me practice in the lake.
May 17, 10:15: OMGThiswateriscold.
May 17, 12:00: Crap, I haven't been actually diving for 3 months now (lockdown, self-isolations, what-not).

May 19, May 20: Two spontaneous dives with good buddies. It's a bit shaky especially on dive one, but in my own mind (since visibility in Zurich lake would not allow videos to prove otherwise anyway) I am looking gorgeous, flat like a pancake, stable like a rock. Could surely start full cave tomorrow with that skillset. Right.

May 22: Wait, there was some reading and worksheets at some point. I redo the reading and worksheets. Granted, there is not that much theory in this course, and hardly any new one.

S01E01: Fly me to the moo... surface

Wake up at 6am, get 2 espressos, pack the rented car (beautiful red Citroen C1, at 100kmh (60mph) one no longer hears the radio) and off we go to the beautiful city of Lucerne. We're meeting at the school of my buddy, where I get to touch scooters and rebreathers. They wouldn't however fit into Citroen C1, so I cannot buy them.

The morning session is dedicated to theory, which we'll fast forward: history of GUE, goals, projects. Croissants. Why buoyancy and trim are important. More croissants.

Then come dry runs of kicks. We both get some small corrections, but in general our kicks are decent, even mine. On the floor though. You know what's great about the floor? SPOILERS: It doesn't allow your knees to drop beneath it.

More croissants.

Equipment. My buddy's gear is perfectly fine, no time spent there.
I get a bigger wing to replace my single-tank one, and a set of doubles. Few D-rings get moved a bit, some straps shortened, some extended, but surprisingly not too much. DS4 prove a bit tricky to configure with a twinset though. In the end I can squeeze in my head between them though, and it feels pleasantly snuggly.

Going for a dive!
It starts raining.
Divespot is fortunately located under a highway bridge. Better roaring trucks than pouring rain above I guess.
Also, gotta cross a street with a twinset. Fortunately, people slow down since steel tanks would dent their cars for sure.

Did I mention I get a tank lamp? I feel so professional. Also, I'm getting lost with drysuit inflator, long hose and the lamp's cable all intertwining on my chest. All the knots are in principle topologically trivial, but experimentally I struggle to confirm it.
I managed to keep my long hose free though.

Plan the dive: 1 hour, 8 meters. Jason will lay a line, and we'll be swimming back and forth using different kicks.

GUE Edge in water and descend. It takes two to tango, and I'm sure my buddy was keeping the team formation, but that didn't help too much since with the new tanks on my back my main focus was to not end up face down in the lakebed (is that even a word?). Succeeded at that, certainly sucked at team diving. Regroup at the bottom, acknowledge existence of my buddy, and off we go!

Frog and modified frog go acceptably apparently. Trim is flat if I think about it, not-so-flat when I don't think about it. Most of the time I don't think about it.

Apparently in the flutter kick my knees manage to go though the water down into the bottom. Strange, it worked on the floor. I don't quite trust Jason nor the severly reduced visiblity behind me, but I can no longer deny when I hit the fist he puts under them. Or maybe he moved it up? #conspiracy

Back kick. I move back. And down. Or up. Including trying to vent my drysuit while feet up to prevent flying to the surface and beyond. Air from the feet above my head does not seem to go out via the valve below me. Fortunately my embarrassment is spared by an arrival of a current. Apparently lakes can have currents. Back kick works great with a current. Back kick does not seem to work against it. My flutter kick does though, and visibility became terrible at that point anyway.

After 50+ mins thumbs up, since the current makes the practice rather pointless at that stage.
I manage to stop at 3 meters as planned, though it's probably more thanks to my buddy's infinite stability than my control since at that point I feel so chewed up that I probably wouldn't even think about looking at my gauges anyway.

Feedback:
I am positively surprised - says Jason in the shelter of a highway bridge. He says it in Swiss German, but I pretend I understand Swiss German. Apparently I did understand correctly this time though. He says that he didn't know what to expect from someone with barely 100 dives and I do not completely suck. At home I'm supposed to practice my flutter kick. I guess my girlfriend will be thrilled to look if I drop them and hinge at the hips.

My buddy seems to be doing a tad better than me, but apparently he also dropped his knee. Once.
He doesn't have to practice his kicks tonight.


Stay tuned for the next episode tomorrow.

 

[irycio]

S01E02: On how nitrogen narcosis hits you at 5 meters



Meeting under the bridge at 8am. My buddy is also there, but no sight of Jason's Octavia.

Suddenly, a grey behemoth arrives, barely fitting under the highway bridge. It's Jason's camper, and so the course starts with a tour thereof. It features kitchen which in turn features coffee, so the day starts well. It also features a plethorea of filled tanks - at that point I was thinking that a set of doubles at 5 meters easily lasts 2 hours, so didn't really understand the point of bringing me 2 tanks.


After croissants, we start with a Basic 5 dry run. Fun starts at part 3 - the s-drill, but without really swimming anywhere or surfacing. Due to corona, it no longer features actually putting someone else's reg into your mouth, which at that point seems like a minor difference.


Short run through GUE EDGE (in German the mnemonic would become something around ZUA EDGU, #catchy):

Goal: look pretty at 5 meters.

Unified Team: roughly know which team member you just bumped into.

Equipment: don't entangle your long hose in the harness.

Exposure: as long as you're warm (how long will you manage in a lake if you do not properly close your drysuit?).

Decompression: minimum? Stop at 6m, 3m and 0m. The last one is doable.

Gases: Nitrox 32 +/- 5%. Do not forget what the analyser said before putting it on a sticker.

Environment: Cold lake with 3 meters visibility, silty bottom, right next to a road and under a highway. Closest hospital only 10 minutes away, but your 3500 CHF (~3500USD) per year health insurance still won’t cover your hyperbaric treatments.


And off we go!


Kicks work slightly better today, though my knees still tend to drop somewhat during the flutter. On the video however it didn’t look as dramatic as I expected. Still I get to swim my distances for some good 20 minutes. The reduced visibility I blame on blooming, not on my kicks.

Also, SI Tech Antares dry glove system is not fool-proof, as proven by my right hand which at that point doesn’t grab too well anymore.


Basic 5 time. Jason demonstrates, then we repeat. Surprisingly my buddy manages quite quickly, and soon enough it’s my time. Numbers 1 and 2 go smoothly, and then comes the number 3. My lamp cable seems to be like a USB plug - fits where it should only after third try, even though there are only two possibilities. In the end however I manage to go through the drill, only mildly blinding everyone around. It’s not like with that visibility they can see anything anyway.

Mask flooding - be my guest. Mask removal and replacement gets funnier though. I am absolutely convinced that my contact lenses will be washed away as soon as I open my eyes, so to prevent flying to the surface I exhale overzealously. When the mask is back visibility seems to have deteriorated even further, in barely 10 seconds.


Ah, no. It’s just my face in the bottom. Well, better than finding myself on the surface I guess.


As a reward I get to practice my kicks further, with Jason selling underwater to hold my butt tight, but at the same time increase the range of motion. Yeah, right…


At the end we go down to the stunning depth of 9 meters, in order to execute a pretty ascent to the surface. To my surprise it actually works well - I do not overshoot the 6m or 3m stops, so how hard can it bit while gas sharing?


In debriefing Jason seems quite pleased, especially with my buddy. I hear that my kicks still have a room for improvement, and that maybe I should do the helicopter turn in the direction where I won’t end up kicking the bottom (it’s some 30 degrees slope and whenever I turn back 180 degrees I feel prone to turning with my fins towards it, which doesn’t help the visibility - I’m sure this stupidity is due to nitrogen narcosis, they say it kicks people at different depths).



S-Drill dry run. Well, it’s not really that different from Basic 5’s number 3. We detach the tanks, use cable ties to attach regs to the backplates, and guide each other around the parking. I enjoy it a lot, since the parking lot is warm and I don’t have to control my buoyancy and trim. I totally nailed it the first time, even without the mask.


And then we go diving again.


GUE Edge on the surface, this time lead by my buddy. For a CMAS/IANTD/ANDI/TDI instructor he knows his GUE quite well. When we get to the part with showing how long our long hose is, I discover that mine is the shortest. 5 minutes spent on me frantically trying to reattach the harness on the surface. My buddy consoles me that it happens to him all the time. Yeah, sure…


Finally we go down! Back kick practice time. It works in the sense that I do go back. Sometimes also up or down, and it’s frantic, but hey, if the alternative is to damage the coral reef, I guess this is still better.


Then we move to S-Drill. First I’m out of gas. I signal it to my buddy, but instead of my right hand slashing my throat, it moves on the level of my left hand, recreating the video of the Las Ketchup song’s Asereje, a big hit in the 90s. Still, my buddy got it and his first stage is right in front of me. I grab it and almost put it in my mouth, but then realise that I’m not supposed to do it. I give it back, switch to my backup and then grab it again. Well, let’s hope I won’t try that in the real OOG.

We realign and my buddy guides me along the line. He’s so stable and decisive that he’d probably manage to keep my at the same depth even if I fully inflated my wing. I better not try that though.


Then it’s my turn, and it does surprisingly work. Takes me a while to get in front of my buddy, but once I’m there it goes smoothly up until we have to turn and start swimming. Just like before I try my best to turn in the suboptimal direction first, almost kicking my poor OOG buddy in the face, before Jason suggests that maybe I try the other way round. Must be the narcosis. In the end however we manage and I’m sure my buddy was reassured by my firm grip on his arm.


To finish the dive we go again to 9 meters and I’m to discover there that I’m OOG. Not for real of course, but we want to practice the ascent while sharing the gas. I grab the offered reg, and we start ascending. Somehow the addition of regulator in one of my hands (I think it was in the right, but I’m not so sure anymore…) makes me forget that I might want to deflate something, and before I remember, the 6m stop is but a distant memory. My buddy somehow deflates my wing, and then we drop back to 7m, where then Jason starts inflating my wing. Yeah sure, serve yourselves. In the end we manage to get to the surface and nobody knows what happened. Jason decides we might want to repeat it next time and he’ll ponder in the meantime which hand does what. The corona-modified version seemed a trivial change on the paper, right.

The theory part on the other hand is rather uneventful. We compute SACs - I managed to get to 23l/min during the final dive, while on recreational lake dives I’m below 15l/min. Jason is also above 20l/min though, and only my buddy stays relaxed at 14l/min.


We rush through the rest of the maths, and finish the evening with a few stories from my buddy’s experience - on regular air dives to 100 meters in the early 90s, on cave rescues with SAC of 50l/min (for a single diver), on deco divers not able to hold their stop without holding onto a deco line.


And now I have 3 weeks for relaxed diving before the rest of the course.

 

[BoltSnap]

Meeting under the bridge at 8am

Why this location with such crappy vis when you have so many nice lakes with better visibility in CH?

I have 3 weeks for relaxed diving before the rest of the course

Why this 3 week break?

 

[BoltSnap]

there will be some swimming test

What does the swim test involve and where did you do it?

 

[irycio]

Why this location with such crappy vis when you have so many nice lakes with better visibility in CH?

On Day 1 we went there cause it offered shelter from the rain, e.g. the highway bridge, and it was raining cats and dogs.
On Day 2 we went there cause normally Lake Lucerne should have a very decent vis.

Why this 3 week break?

Cause I have no holidays to spare, so we had to find 2 weekends to suit everyone. Two subsequent weekends would be better I guess, but yesterday I was tired enough to be happy that there is a split to start with.

What does the swim test involve and where did you do it?

It's 275 m swimming in less than 14 minutes and 15 meter underwater swim. We'll do it next week in a lake since swimming pools are still closed. I don't expect too much trouble there though.

 

[BoltSnap]

On Day 1 we went there cause it offered shelter from the rain, e.g. the highway bridge, and it was raining cats and dogs.
On Day 2 we went there cause normally Lake Lucerne should have a very decent vis.

Strange place to do openwater training especially when you have to cross the highway wearing full scuba with double tanks to get to the dive spot. There are a million lakes in CH and I am sure he could have found one with better access and some sort of a shade for protection from rain.

I wish you better water conditions in a better place for the next weekend of water work.

BTW, if you have to do the swim test in a lake with just a bathing suit, isn't that going to be very cold in the open air?

 

[irycio]

Strange place to do openwater training especially when you have to cross the highway wearing full scuba with double tanks to get to the dive spot. There are a million lakes in CH and I am sure he could have found one with better access and some sort of a shade for protection from rain.

I wish you better water conditions in a better place for the next weekend of water work.

BTW, if you have to do the swim test in a lake with just a bathing suit, isn't that going to be very cold in the open air?

Agreed there probably are nicer places to dive (and certainly nicer places to train), but then again, the conditions here were like you'd expect on a usual dive in Zurich lake, which is where majority of my dives take place. Still, we decided to move somewhere else for the rest of the course.

It's gonna be damn cold in the lake during the swim test - air temperature on the other hand is quite pleasant at the moment though.

 

[BoltSnap]

usual dive in Zurich lake, which is where majority of my dives take place

You dive there?????? I have been there many many times and I never thought there would be anything interesting to dive for there. Visibility is most terrible there.

It's gonna be damn cold in the lake during the swim test

If you are going to be in a bathing suit only for the swim test, I believe that it will be so cold and unsafe to do so in a lake. I wouldn't do it.

 

[irycio]

You dive there?????? I have been there many many times and I never thought there would be anything interesting to dive for there. Visibility is most terrible there.

But I live at the lake, 5 minutes from the closest dive spot. Not particularly interesting, but for an after-work dive does the job.

If you are going to be in a bathing suit only for the swim test, I believe that it will be so cold and unsafe to do so in a lake. I wouldn't do it.

It's not so bad on the surface, whole families are nowadays swimming in the lake.

 

[BoltSnap]

But I live at the lake, 5 minutes from the closest dive spot. Not particularly interesting, but for an after-work dive does the job.

Then I must have passed your house many times when I am doing my walks by the lake I usually walk from the train station down Bahnhofstrasse to the lake and walk to the right or left for few miles and then back. Couple of times rented a paddle boat in the lake but never thought of diving it. Does it get better visibility and underwater scenery further out on the opposite direction?