Do you practice safety procedures regularly?

[DandyDon]

as a newbie with only 25 dives under my BC I still do the practice drills just to remind myself on how to do them so they stay fresh in my mind. Saying that when I got my OW cert. the person who was my dive buddy at the time was a divemaster and had some trouble with the reg. when we did our OOA , share air part of the test. When we got up to the surface he had told me that he had not done that in quite a few dives and had forgotten how to do that. Guess even the best divers should still do the basics once in awhile just to keep up the habits.

I can only Like that once, so

 

[kd3pc]

My wife is my usual buddy, and for every dive we take one skill and practice it prior to the actual planned dive. We do the usual predive checks of course, but pick something that we have not done recently. It could be as simple as scoping out our descent and start point to clearing our mask or regulator swap. We do try to do this away from others and before we get to 30'. Several times a year we add nav and kick counts just in case.

Last dive out, she wore my wetsuit (3mm thicker than hers) and when we went to descend, she was floating...not enough weight for the different suit. This just reinforced her thought process to check things and practice skills.

 

[TSandM]

I used to do tons of drills . . . not so many any more, although we do S and valve drills at the beginning of each cave diving trip. I need to get out with the pre-Fundies folks and do a bunch more.

 

[leabre]

When diving with other team divers I'll do the bubble check, mod-s, SADDDD sequence (GUE EDGE for GUE divers) and plan the dive. Because I tend to take a class about every 6 months I get plenty of time to practice certain skills (toxing diver, unconscious diver, OOG, any of the 9 valve failures, failed primary light, and maskless). As a UTD Divemaster I get ample oppurtunity to practice when assisting classes, demonstrating, or helping people prepare (or preparing myself) for upcoming training sessions. My dives tend to be fun, however. So what usually happens is we'll throw something in here or there on a dive but it's never the focus of a dive.

When diving with divers who aren't trained in like manner then I tend not to practice anything as they have no interest in it or often don't understand it when I do -- the training protocol is can sometimes be drastically different than what they are accustomed to. Many of the purely recreational divers that I dive with, however, don't ever practice anything.

 

[Doc Harry]

There is a recent thread with this same question.

 

[TMHeimer]

I shallow solo dive a lot and occasionally practise reg retrieval, fin pivot, etc.--the stuff you can do alone. Last couple of years I have had no usual buddy (live in the boonies), and to be honest, don't do anything with insta-buddies, as your typical charter rec. dive isn't that long -30-45 minutes. So I just do the dive. I do, however, constantly review all the skills we were taught to demonstrate in DM course by going through them on land. Not the best situation, but you do what you gotta do.

 

[ajduplessis]

Safety drills/procedures IMO are stuff like pressure checks, Sdrils and regulator checks and must be done on each and every dive. Then you get skills those include deploying buoys, valve drills, OOA, gas sharing, mask clearing, kit removal to name a few. I perform skills on all dives except holidays and expedition dives, any other dive and we dedicate at least one full dive on skills only.