Question: Do you do drills???

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WYDT

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Do you drill on the normal emerg. procedures (other than the S-drill) even after your Full cave class is over??

How often? Every dive? Every other dive? Once a weekend?

How about those of you who only dive once every few months? Do you do some drills when you first dive again?

I think it's very important to keep sharp and my buddies and I try to do somekind of drill at least once every weekend of diving. Which lately has been every weekend! :D
 
I try to do drills on most of my dives. Basic stuff. Recently I have been doing a few dives in very shallow water (15 - 30 ft) to work on trim.

Eric
 
I have been getting in the habit lately of doing some sort of drill everytime I dive. Living in Texas, I am a little far from most of the cave systems, so I have to improvise a bit. The closest place to dive for us is an old sand pit where they removed landfill to make an overpass, and it filled in with artesian water. The bottom is very silty, and has a moss bed covering a large part of it. There are training platforms for openwater checkout, as well as a few sunken objects. Max depth is about 25' on a good day, and if you are really lucky and no one has been in stirring stuff up viz may be 10'.

I am now in the habit of swimming just inches off the bottom, checking behind me every few minutes to see if I am causing any silting. The shallow depth also helps you stay sharp on your bouyancy. I also take one of my reels and practice drills with that. Doing primary tie offs while hovering and not stirring up silt etc, then running the line, doing placements and then tying off to other objects. Then I do a mask removal, and practice following the line with no mask and eyes closed to simulate a silt out, or primary light failure.

I have also had an open water buddy lead me back to shore at the end of a dive with my mask off using touch contact so that I stay familiar with that drill as well.

The really interesting thing is that a lot of divers look at this place as a 'mudhole' not worthy of much attention. But because of the conditions around it, I dive it any chance I get because I feel it is a good training ground for keeping my cave skills sharp even when not in the cave environment. It is really amazing now that I have had proper training in anti-silting techniques, and proper gear configuration relating to entaglement hazards and good trim, to observe some of the other divers that go out here. I can often find other divers that swim out of my viz by simply following their silt trail, but I have had several buddies that were inattentive lose me completely because I left no evidence of which direction I swam in.

Every dive is what you make of it.


Dive often, but dive safe

John
 
To answer it simply, yes. I try to practice some drill on every dive.
 
Ingrained understanding of protocols is what keeps you cool when the S*&t hits the fan, not remembering that you did it once. You don't gain this understanding without repetition.
In a word, yes.
 
Yes. One of the caves we dive sometimes reuires a touch contact drill just to get in. I love to run line (I need to find a cave that doesn't have any). We practice running lines with dry gloves and wearing two stages (we dive some cold caves).
 
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http://cavediveflorida.com/Rum_House.htm

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