(I'm not posting this in the rebreather section since it's more for open circuit divers who might be considering CCR training. Mods, feel free to move it if necessary.)
Closing in on 900 dives, I had started to feel fairly comfortable as a scuba diver, even in our local NYC area waters. The days of being a brand new open water diver - struggling with physics, gear and buoyancy - were long behind me. Although I always respect the sport and plan safe dives, I had even become a bit complacent. As I know from past experience, complacency leads to trouble. So what's the cure for all of this? Simple. Become a newbie again!
I had been vaguely considering a rebreather for several years. Everyone told me that they are great for photographing wildlife, and I also liked the idea of not schlepping two sets of double 119s and deco bottles through west side highway traffic twice a week for gas fills. Also, the academic aspects of it intrigued me. I always found stuff like deco theory interesting, and with a CCR (closed circuit rebreather), there was a whole world of new material to learn.
I had done technical and advanced wreck training with Wayne Fisch (Wayne at Diveseekers here on Scubaboard), the owner of Diveseekers in Hillsborough, NJ, and I knew that if I did rebreather training, I wanted to do it with him. Wayne is a tough instructor and an excellent teacher. He is also a terrific diver. Those things don't always go together, but it's inspiring to be in the water with someone totally in control of their trim, situational awareness and dive efficiency. It's not just getting through the skills, but doing them at as high a level as you possibly can that makes his courses so worthwhile. Wayne is a never-ending source of tips and tricks that have really optimized my diving over the years. Also, the surprises that he throws at you underwater help get you ready for the day that those surprises come at you for real! So we planned a couple of back to back long weekends at Dutch Springs for my training on a JJ rebreather.
When you start diving a CCR, many of the skills that you have honed over the years are useless. In fact, rebreather instructors sometimes say that their most difficult students are the ones with lots of experience - much more to "unlearn". The instinctive way that OC divers fine tune their buoyancy by breathing is useless, since the single breath that you are circulating has the same amount of lift whether it's in your lungs or in the rebreather. It takes a while to learn proper buoyancy and trim; uncontrolled descents and runaway ascents are common as we struggle to manage the air bubbles in the CCR, the dry suit and the wing simultaneously.
The importance of not letting a small failure become a big problem is a lesson that most OC divers learn early. This rule is even more important with a CCR, as I found out on my second to last training dive. A leaking mask is a minor annoyance on OC, but on CC it can be deadly. Clearing your mask is done with gas from the loop, and each time you clear your mask, you change your buoyancy and PO2. Also, you are using gas from the small bottle of diluent, so doing it too often can cause you to run low on this gas (otherwise a very rare problem).
I have a mustache, and for years I managed the minor leaks that it causes with silicone grease and occasional mask clearing - really never a big deal before. But on dive 6 of the class, it got annoying enough that I decided to try a different mask, which I got in a local scuba store. I tried it out in shallow water before taking it on a rebreather dive, and it seemed to fit. Then I went off on dive 7, the most difficult one of the class so far, with lots of tasks in very cold, deep, murky water. And a new piece of critical gear, which in retrospect was a very stupid decision on my part.
The leakage soon became constant. I spent most of the dive clearing the mask, but even scarier was the fact that when breathing on the loop, water would drip back through my nose into my throat. I was essentially waterboarding myself, something that never had happened on OC with even the leakiest mask. Possibly related to the different airway pressures on CC, this caused me to have choking episodes. I had to break that panic spiral by going to bailout several times during the dive, but each time I calmed down, cleared the mask, and got back on the loop. This was by far the most miserable that I had ever been underwater, but I really wanted to get through the plan. A seemingly endless dive ("only" 90 minutes in reality) finally ended with launching SMBs and a staged ascent. Wow, was I happy to surface!
Wayne has given me lots of diving advice over the years, but for the first time he gave me some grooming advice. He suggested shaving a thin line of mustache, just below my nose, barely visible but enough to let the mask seal. I went into the bathroom at Dutch Springs, cleaned up my stache and headed into dive 8 with my old mask.
The phrase "night and day" is overused, but there is no other way to describe the difference. Dive 7 was the worst dive of my life, dive 8 was one of the best. The mask fit perfectly and stayed dry, and I felt dialed in and comfortable in all positions. Cruising along the wall was serene - while it takes a while to get buoyancy down with a CCR, once you have it, you don't have the drifting up and down that is often a part of OC diving. Wayne even let me take my big camera rig along, and I had no problem wrangling it (something that I had been worried about). The visibility at Dutch Springs was the worst I had ever seen, so the photos weren't that great, but I didn't care, I was having a blast!
One quick word about the JJ. I obviously only have experience with this one unit, but I have done test dives on three others, and I have spent a lot of time looking at other options at dive shows. All I can say is that this is one beautiful piece of gear. It is clearly engineered from the ground up, not adapted from earlier systems. Even though it is one of the most serious and capable expedition grade rebreathers out there, it is very simple in design, without a lot of the complexities that I saw elsewhere. Every little part is a jewel, machined perfectly, and extremely solid and rugged. Any rebreather requires a good deal of attention to detail in assembly and setup, but this was extremely straightforward and quick. I had the opportunity to observe a fellow student with a different unit. Not only did his assembly take a lot longer, he missed the last day of diving because his brand new CCR had a pinched O-ring in one of the several extra valves, and it couldn't be replaced. I don't meant to say that the JJ is the best, because I'm not qualified to judge all the other rebreathers out there. But I can say that this is an extremely capable, solid and simple unit, with clean lines and an uncluttered front end that makes me happy to dive it.
So thanks, Wayne... Thanks for introducing me to the world of CCR, thanks making me a better diver, and thanks for the grooming tip!
Closing in on 900 dives, I had started to feel fairly comfortable as a scuba diver, even in our local NYC area waters. The days of being a brand new open water diver - struggling with physics, gear and buoyancy - were long behind me. Although I always respect the sport and plan safe dives, I had even become a bit complacent. As I know from past experience, complacency leads to trouble. So what's the cure for all of this? Simple. Become a newbie again!
I had been vaguely considering a rebreather for several years. Everyone told me that they are great for photographing wildlife, and I also liked the idea of not schlepping two sets of double 119s and deco bottles through west side highway traffic twice a week for gas fills. Also, the academic aspects of it intrigued me. I always found stuff like deco theory interesting, and with a CCR (closed circuit rebreather), there was a whole world of new material to learn.
I had done technical and advanced wreck training with Wayne Fisch (Wayne at Diveseekers here on Scubaboard), the owner of Diveseekers in Hillsborough, NJ, and I knew that if I did rebreather training, I wanted to do it with him. Wayne is a tough instructor and an excellent teacher. He is also a terrific diver. Those things don't always go together, but it's inspiring to be in the water with someone totally in control of their trim, situational awareness and dive efficiency. It's not just getting through the skills, but doing them at as high a level as you possibly can that makes his courses so worthwhile. Wayne is a never-ending source of tips and tricks that have really optimized my diving over the years. Also, the surprises that he throws at you underwater help get you ready for the day that those surprises come at you for real! So we planned a couple of back to back long weekends at Dutch Springs for my training on a JJ rebreather.
When you start diving a CCR, many of the skills that you have honed over the years are useless. In fact, rebreather instructors sometimes say that their most difficult students are the ones with lots of experience - much more to "unlearn". The instinctive way that OC divers fine tune their buoyancy by breathing is useless, since the single breath that you are circulating has the same amount of lift whether it's in your lungs or in the rebreather. It takes a while to learn proper buoyancy and trim; uncontrolled descents and runaway ascents are common as we struggle to manage the air bubbles in the CCR, the dry suit and the wing simultaneously.
The importance of not letting a small failure become a big problem is a lesson that most OC divers learn early. This rule is even more important with a CCR, as I found out on my second to last training dive. A leaking mask is a minor annoyance on OC, but on CC it can be deadly. Clearing your mask is done with gas from the loop, and each time you clear your mask, you change your buoyancy and PO2. Also, you are using gas from the small bottle of diluent, so doing it too often can cause you to run low on this gas (otherwise a very rare problem).
I have a mustache, and for years I managed the minor leaks that it causes with silicone grease and occasional mask clearing - really never a big deal before. But on dive 6 of the class, it got annoying enough that I decided to try a different mask, which I got in a local scuba store. I tried it out in shallow water before taking it on a rebreather dive, and it seemed to fit. Then I went off on dive 7, the most difficult one of the class so far, with lots of tasks in very cold, deep, murky water. And a new piece of critical gear, which in retrospect was a very stupid decision on my part.
The leakage soon became constant. I spent most of the dive clearing the mask, but even scarier was the fact that when breathing on the loop, water would drip back through my nose into my throat. I was essentially waterboarding myself, something that never had happened on OC with even the leakiest mask. Possibly related to the different airway pressures on CC, this caused me to have choking episodes. I had to break that panic spiral by going to bailout several times during the dive, but each time I calmed down, cleared the mask, and got back on the loop. This was by far the most miserable that I had ever been underwater, but I really wanted to get through the plan. A seemingly endless dive ("only" 90 minutes in reality) finally ended with launching SMBs and a staged ascent. Wow, was I happy to surface!
Wayne has given me lots of diving advice over the years, but for the first time he gave me some grooming advice. He suggested shaving a thin line of mustache, just below my nose, barely visible but enough to let the mask seal. I went into the bathroom at Dutch Springs, cleaned up my stache and headed into dive 8 with my old mask.
The phrase "night and day" is overused, but there is no other way to describe the difference. Dive 7 was the worst dive of my life, dive 8 was one of the best. The mask fit perfectly and stayed dry, and I felt dialed in and comfortable in all positions. Cruising along the wall was serene - while it takes a while to get buoyancy down with a CCR, once you have it, you don't have the drifting up and down that is often a part of OC diving. Wayne even let me take my big camera rig along, and I had no problem wrangling it (something that I had been worried about). The visibility at Dutch Springs was the worst I had ever seen, so the photos weren't that great, but I didn't care, I was having a blast!
One quick word about the JJ. I obviously only have experience with this one unit, but I have done test dives on three others, and I have spent a lot of time looking at other options at dive shows. All I can say is that this is one beautiful piece of gear. It is clearly engineered from the ground up, not adapted from earlier systems. Even though it is one of the most serious and capable expedition grade rebreathers out there, it is very simple in design, without a lot of the complexities that I saw elsewhere. Every little part is a jewel, machined perfectly, and extremely solid and rugged. Any rebreather requires a good deal of attention to detail in assembly and setup, but this was extremely straightforward and quick. I had the opportunity to observe a fellow student with a different unit. Not only did his assembly take a lot longer, he missed the last day of diving because his brand new CCR had a pinched O-ring in one of the several extra valves, and it couldn't be replaced. I don't meant to say that the JJ is the best, because I'm not qualified to judge all the other rebreathers out there. But I can say that this is an extremely capable, solid and simple unit, with clean lines and an uncluttered front end that makes me happy to dive it.
So thanks, Wayne... Thanks for introducing me to the world of CCR, thanks making me a better diver, and thanks for the grooming tip!
Of course, there are times when you absolutely have to get off the breather and stay off. In those rare instances, that's why we have our bailout tanks so that we can take open circuit to the surface. Like I said though, if you don't do your proper checks before and at the beginning of the dive, don't pay attention during the dive, your element of risks goes up substantially. If you practice your drills and are diligent, it is the best diving in the world and can be rather safe. Relatively of course.
