airmanbaseball,
Judgin by your posts, you appear to have a good head on your shoulders and your enthusiasm for the sport is admirable. While I live in an area that affords me plenty of open water diving, presently I too am limited in the number of local dives I can get in, but this is due to cold seasons and iced up lakes and rivers. I don't have the skills, expereince or gear to attempt winter diving.
But you can get valuable diving time in, even when there's little open water available, if you have a local pool, and some expereinced local divers who would be willing to help you develop your skills.
You will find, as I did recently, that most of the skills that you need to develop can be done so in the pool. Proficiency can be attained in the controlled environment more readily than in the open water, with fewer risks.
Get a local DM or DI who is willing to help you work on bouyancy, trim, different fin kicks. smb deployment, etc, and then drill yourself with all the safety skills to the point where you don't think, you instinctively act. Study dive planning and gas management principles until these become second nature. Task load the safety skills by perfroming them while neutrally buoyant, and not kneeling on the bottom. You may find yourself in a situation where there is not bottom to kneel upon, so it's good to know how to do these while hovering in a horiziontal position. (again you donlt need depth for this type of practice.
Is is true that true may will not get a great deal of exposure to handling current, and low visability issues, and the effect of higher pressure on SAC, trim and buoyancy but if you become truly proficient at the skills that you can do in the pool while awaiting the opportunity to dive in open water, it then becomes a case of adapting to the subleties that increased pressure will create.
Most importantly work yourself down to the deeper depths gradually. Once you have proficient skills, gradually increasing your diving depths will allow you make the fine adjustments to your diving and your gear that the effects of pressure will cause.
All of this does not mean that you have to practice for years before hitting deep dives. A few months of added practice (depending on your proficiency and a few gradual dives for pressure exposure and your on your way.
I did not do these things and had issues on my AOW at 95 feet down with keeping myself trimmed, and buoyant. This increased the stress that I was under, and I wnet through air like there was no tomorrow.
My wife and I are now planning to hit the pool on regular basis, at least once a week, tp practice these same skills, in prep for the upcoming diving season.
DO NOT put too much faith in doing deep dives with DI or DM assistance alone. That's exactly what we did, and it ended up in a seriouslty flawed dive terminiating in OOA. I;m not saying this will happen to you, you very well could be a much more skilled diver than I, but the risk is there noe the less.
One can never eliminate the risks, just reduce the possibility of these risks.
Safe diving.
Storm
and his love of the sport.
