Well I had confined water session 1 last night, or at least an attempt at confined water 1. My instructor gave us our first important lesson of the course, check all your gear before you dive. He was teaching an OW class before us, and had decided that day he didn't want to wear his drysuit in the pool, so he put together a set of double 80's and grabbed his old DR classic wing, instead of his Halcyon which was on his double 130's, and he headed to the pool. That wing has seen a few hundred dives, including his first dive into the engine room of the Empress of Ireland. Well when he got in the water he found out that the lower dump was leaking and wouldn't hold any air, making it rather difficult to show proper trim and buoyancy. Well lesson learned, check my gear before each dive.
So he decided to abandon the gear, since it was useless for demonstrating trim and buoyancy, and he said we had a free pool session to work on anything we wanted, and we'd add another pool or open water session to the schedule to make up for it. He told us to just practice anything we wanted, and he'd be freediving with his video camera to take some shots of us. This actually worked out in my favour, giving me an hour to come to grips with my new White's Fusion drysuit, without also trying to learn a pile of new skills. I was actually pretty pleased with everything. Buoyancy and trim was surprisingly easy to get the handle on in that suit, compared with other suits I've tried. I felt pretty relaxed right away and didn't struggle with it much at all. I did some valve drills, mask on/off, switch to backup mask, lots of finning work. The only part I struggled with was the backfinning. By the end of the session, I could move backward just a touch, and it started to make sense to me, so this weekend I'm going to head to the quarry and practice more of that.
He gave us a debriefing based on what he watched and filmed while freediving, and said that he was pretty pleased with us overall, and we were one of the better groups he's had. Normally I guess he always has at least one trainwreck that needs a LOT of work to straighten out. Out of the 4 of us, the least experienced has been diving for over 5 years and currently working on Rescue, I'm working on DM and the other two are instructors, one is MSDT and Course Director for ACUC, so we all had a solid base of comfort in the water, which seemed to help the transition quite a bit.
During our debrief, the only things to point out after our "practice session" was that a couple guys were overweighted, and all of us need to put on the handcuffs and stop sculling with our hands in the water. So overall it wasn't the pool session I had been expecting, but at least we get another session anyway, and it did give me some things to work on over the next week to prepare more for the "new" skills we'll be working on.
Jim
