E.C.Hansen
Registered
Day 1 - http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/ne...3834-my-aow-certification-mexico-day-1-a.html
I forgot all about my belly as I walked through the sand to the dive shop for the briefing. Today I was going to dive in the ocean! For my first time ever! Sure I grew up in California, snorkeled up and down Baja on family vacations, enjoyed sailing, power boats and skiing once we moved to Virginia, but this was gonna be a big first for me and I was excited!
In the briefing I found out that we're going to do Nav on the first dive and Search and Recovery later. We reviewed the skills I'd use and the tasks I'd need to do as well as the conditions, what special kinds of fish to keep an eye out for (Mantas, Barracuda, and the rare shark), and go over backwards roll water entry from a boat. Then we climbed aboard and headed out to the reef. I learned a couple more things this morning and didn't even have to make mistakes to do it! First, I took the time to carefully position the weights on my belt so that they were right at my sides and forward of my body's center-line. That made a huge difference and I was much more stable and comfortable in the water. The other thing was about mask choice. In the past while snorkeling I used whatever mask happened to be handy, if it leaked a little I could just lift my head and empty it. In my OW class, the instructor really stressed finding a mask that fits right as the first piece of gear anyone buys. As we rolled backwards off of the boat I did everything I was trained to. I put a burst of air into my BC, I held my weight belt buckle with one hand, I held my reg in my mouth with the palm of the other and my mask with a couple fingers, rolled off and got stable in the water, and flashed OK to the boat. I had to swim around the boat to the rest of the group and then the instructor saw a problem and let me know that my mask strap was flopping around loose on top of my head. If I hadn't taken the time to find one that fit right I could have had a real short dive, but even without the strap and with my mustache it just stayed comfortably right in place. I had on 12 pounds of weight and as we started to descend I was sinking a lot slower than most of the group, so my instructor put a 2 pound weight into the pocket of my BC, after that I had a moment to look around and take in what was around me as we dropped. The visibility was probably about 20-30m and the bottom at 15m was already in sight, with big coral heads and sandy patches like clearings in a forest. We equalized as we dropped and saw more and more detail as we got closer to the reef. What looked like single huge formations from above, started becoming individuals in a massive group. Big brain coral, fans of coral, coral that looked like antlers, and streamers that looked like fuzzy ribbons hanging off the reef. The dive plan included a few minutes of sightseeing as soon as we got down and it was a good thing, there was so much going on around me that it took a couple moments to adjust. The water was surging so much that it moved us a meter or more with each surge. The coral that looked like so much rock from above was moving as well, streamers and fans swaying like tall grass in a breeze, and small clouds of fish darting around or just hanging in a group in some protected nook. Every now and then you could see little puffs of sand blowing around like dust on a country road.
After a brief tour we arrived at a good sized sandy patch and my buddy and I started our skill tests while the instructor watched us and set up more. Now these tests aren't real hard and we worked through them with little delay so that we could do some more sightseeing with our left over time. After getting an OK sign on the last test and picking up the line and reel we were using we set off and I really got to see some of the huge variety of fish in the area. One of the first things that jumps into my memory was a school of Blue Tangs that was about a meter around but stretched in each direction as far as I could see. Each fish was only 25 or 30cm but the school looked like a black snake winding its way past. There was also a much less dense school of silver colored Bar Jacks that were twice the size of the smaller Tangs and were swimming parallel and just a couple meters above them. A Silver ribbon floating above a black one. Then we swam through a series of pass-throughs under wide ceilings of coral. There were lobsters with feelers as long as my arm, brilliant colored fish with neon yellow, fire engine red and colors of blue that I have only seen under black lights, there were big mottled blue-gray fish that had tails that looked tie-dyed. There were angry looking red spiny fish with big dark eyes that sort of hid under ledges, and pale little shrimp, and hundreds of kinds of coral. I'm running out of adjectives about now, but I think you get the idea, there was a lot to see and most all of it was beautiful! Before long we started a slow safe ascent and came up a couple dozen meters from the boat.
I would like to say that the entire day was trouble free, but there was one thing that happened on this dive that became a pain later. While hanging head down to look under a ledge or at some point turning on my back to look behind us, I felt something in my right ear shift a little bit. It felt kind of like an air bubble inside my ear released and came out, then it felt just like getting that water in your ear in the shower or pool that wont drain out. It didn't bother me or hurt, it just felt funny, maybe a little stuffy. Until the second dive of the day. On the boat ride back to the beach we talked about the skills, went over why the triangle navigation test took me an extra minute or two (I had to do the math to get past 360 Deg on the compass three times before I got it straight in my head, he had me start on a heading of 160). We also talked about some of the stuff we saw, they told me what kind of fish were in the big schools I described, and everyone in the boat just chatted. One of the things I'm really starting to love about diving is this: You can gather a boat full of a DM and half a dozen people that are strangers to him and to each other. Before the dive everyone is kind of closed, in their own head, and quiet, but as soon as the dive is over and everyone is back in the boat, everyone is helping each other with gear and wetsuits. Everyone is chatty and loose, everyone is smiling and eager to share that smile and mood with everyone around them. Its a lot of fun to watch a group of people all get into a great mood together!
Once we got back to the beach we had a snack and started briefing for the next dive, the Search and Recovery dive. We started with knots, went over the ones in the PADI book and then Deon showed us a couple tricks with the Figure 8, how to double the line and tie it into a loop, and how to tie a follow-through figure 8, where you tie a loose knot, wrap the end around or through something and then thread the end through the figure 8 again. They seemed like pretty solid knots and the instructor said he wanted us to only use these on the dive. Then we got our gear ready and headed for the boat. This dive was going to be slightly deeper than the last one, 19m instead of 15m. My OW classes were in water less than 7m so every dive I was doing was a new 'deepest' dive for me.
After we rolled into the water and my instructor, again, had to point out my mask strap flopping on top of my head, we emptied our BCs and started to descend. This is where I started noticing that my right ear didn't want to equalize, it felt like there was a bubble or something blocking the air. As soon as it started feeling uncomfortable I signaled that I had ear trouble and ascended a meter or so and continued to try to equalize. After several tries and some kind of hard blowing it 'popped' with a moment of mild pain then seemed ok except for a slight feeling of pressure. I finished the descent slowly, carefully equalizing as I went. It took more effort to equalize that ear but there was no more pain on the way down, still just a slight feeling of pressure, like water in the ear.
Once I made it to the bottom two things really jumped out at me compared to that mornings dive. First was that only 4m deeper everything was a little bigger. The coral were bigger, the fish were bigger, and the trenches between the coral were deeper. The second thing I noticed was that the surge was a lot more pronounced. We took a few minutes and wandered through the coral before we got to the sandy patch where we would do the skill tests. This time the sandy patch was like a flat valley ringed by cliffs and mountains compared to the "forest clearing" feel of the last test spot. We were less than a Km from our last dive site, and only 4m deeper, but it was a dramatically different seascape.
We started with our search patterns and I even found a weight that someone else had lost in the area, the water was pretty clear with 40-50m vis (guessing based on the 30m line we were using), so they went pretty fast and easy. Then we settled in and started securing ropes to the crate of weights that we had brought along.The first knot on each rope was easy, a fast doubled over figure 8 for a neat loop. The second turned out to be a PAIN! the biggest problem was tying the first loose figure 8 without enough line left to loop through the crate handle and still have enough to 'follow-through' the loose knot. This would normally be a minor problem, but as I said earlier, the surge was really moving! I would hold onto the crate and it was pushing me from prone on the sand to completely upside down. Several times we pushed each other back down when the surge flipped us feet up. After 4 or 5 times the amount of time and effort that it would have taken on shore, we finally got the crate rigged and attached to our lift bag. That's when we realized that the exhaust valve was leaking air. It turned out to be a minor thing though, as we just kept adding small bursts of air and moved it to the base of the mooring line and let it settle so we could leave it and do some more sightseeing before finishing the dive.
During the rigging was when my ear started to complain, I could literally feel the surge inside my ear. I tried to equalize, and would feel it work for a moment, then when the next surge hit, it was almost like I could feel a bubble in the ear canal slide out and the pressure would return. As we moved our load to the mooring line it became uncomfortable, but didn't hurt, I knew that we only had 5 or 10 minutes of sightseeing before we would start our ascent so I just bore with it. It pretty much stayed like that for the rest of the dive except for a fast twinge of pain when I was in a narrow between coral heads and the surge hit hard. It distracted me a little bit, but really did little to detract from the dive, I was still surrounded but otherworldly scenes and strangely beautiful creatures. The real highlights of this dive were seeing a parrotfish getting cleaned by half a dozen other little tiny fish, and seeing a juvenile damselfish that was smaller than one of my finger joints, and was such a bright blue with brighter blue spots, that it looked like it was glowing.
We eventually got back to the mooring line and carefully raised our crate as we did our ascent. On the way up I noticed that some of the sand that was suspended in the water was sort of staying in stable little clouds a couple centimeters across. When we got to the surface I asked about them, no one really had any idea what it was but we had a good laugh when I shrugged and said "Probably just parrotfish crap". As we were reviewing the dive in the boat someone asked why specifically we had to use the figure 8 knot, I was impressed when the answer had nothing to do with rigging but instead the instructor said "Most people don't know it, so we can see their ability to concentrate while doing new things underwater instead of familiar ones" he added that with the heavy surge today we all did great.
The next time I saw the friends I was staying with, I found out they had been in an accident in our rental car, and they were all pretty grumpy. As for me, the rest of that day I couldn't shake the feeling of having water in my ear and at one point it even started to ache a little. I rinsed out my sinuses with my netti pot and took an aspirin, that did away with the ache but the watery ear feeling wasn't gone till the next morning. I guess it may have been gone earlier but I lost track of it not long after bed time when Montezuma came around looking for his revenge again. We fought several times that night, but I knew I had more Pepto and ginger so I was unafraid.
Day 3 - http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/ne...fication-mex-day-3-last-dive.html#post4402908
I forgot all about my belly as I walked through the sand to the dive shop for the briefing. Today I was going to dive in the ocean! For my first time ever! Sure I grew up in California, snorkeled up and down Baja on family vacations, enjoyed sailing, power boats and skiing once we moved to Virginia, but this was gonna be a big first for me and I was excited!
In the briefing I found out that we're going to do Nav on the first dive and Search and Recovery later. We reviewed the skills I'd use and the tasks I'd need to do as well as the conditions, what special kinds of fish to keep an eye out for (Mantas, Barracuda, and the rare shark), and go over backwards roll water entry from a boat. Then we climbed aboard and headed out to the reef. I learned a couple more things this morning and didn't even have to make mistakes to do it! First, I took the time to carefully position the weights on my belt so that they were right at my sides and forward of my body's center-line. That made a huge difference and I was much more stable and comfortable in the water. The other thing was about mask choice. In the past while snorkeling I used whatever mask happened to be handy, if it leaked a little I could just lift my head and empty it. In my OW class, the instructor really stressed finding a mask that fits right as the first piece of gear anyone buys. As we rolled backwards off of the boat I did everything I was trained to. I put a burst of air into my BC, I held my weight belt buckle with one hand, I held my reg in my mouth with the palm of the other and my mask with a couple fingers, rolled off and got stable in the water, and flashed OK to the boat. I had to swim around the boat to the rest of the group and then the instructor saw a problem and let me know that my mask strap was flopping around loose on top of my head. If I hadn't taken the time to find one that fit right I could have had a real short dive, but even without the strap and with my mustache it just stayed comfortably right in place. I had on 12 pounds of weight and as we started to descend I was sinking a lot slower than most of the group, so my instructor put a 2 pound weight into the pocket of my BC, after that I had a moment to look around and take in what was around me as we dropped. The visibility was probably about 20-30m and the bottom at 15m was already in sight, with big coral heads and sandy patches like clearings in a forest. We equalized as we dropped and saw more and more detail as we got closer to the reef. What looked like single huge formations from above, started becoming individuals in a massive group. Big brain coral, fans of coral, coral that looked like antlers, and streamers that looked like fuzzy ribbons hanging off the reef. The dive plan included a few minutes of sightseeing as soon as we got down and it was a good thing, there was so much going on around me that it took a couple moments to adjust. The water was surging so much that it moved us a meter or more with each surge. The coral that looked like so much rock from above was moving as well, streamers and fans swaying like tall grass in a breeze, and small clouds of fish darting around or just hanging in a group in some protected nook. Every now and then you could see little puffs of sand blowing around like dust on a country road.
After a brief tour we arrived at a good sized sandy patch and my buddy and I started our skill tests while the instructor watched us and set up more. Now these tests aren't real hard and we worked through them with little delay so that we could do some more sightseeing with our left over time. After getting an OK sign on the last test and picking up the line and reel we were using we set off and I really got to see some of the huge variety of fish in the area. One of the first things that jumps into my memory was a school of Blue Tangs that was about a meter around but stretched in each direction as far as I could see. Each fish was only 25 or 30cm but the school looked like a black snake winding its way past. There was also a much less dense school of silver colored Bar Jacks that were twice the size of the smaller Tangs and were swimming parallel and just a couple meters above them. A Silver ribbon floating above a black one. Then we swam through a series of pass-throughs under wide ceilings of coral. There were lobsters with feelers as long as my arm, brilliant colored fish with neon yellow, fire engine red and colors of blue that I have only seen under black lights, there were big mottled blue-gray fish that had tails that looked tie-dyed. There were angry looking red spiny fish with big dark eyes that sort of hid under ledges, and pale little shrimp, and hundreds of kinds of coral. I'm running out of adjectives about now, but I think you get the idea, there was a lot to see and most all of it was beautiful! Before long we started a slow safe ascent and came up a couple dozen meters from the boat.
I would like to say that the entire day was trouble free, but there was one thing that happened on this dive that became a pain later. While hanging head down to look under a ledge or at some point turning on my back to look behind us, I felt something in my right ear shift a little bit. It felt kind of like an air bubble inside my ear released and came out, then it felt just like getting that water in your ear in the shower or pool that wont drain out. It didn't bother me or hurt, it just felt funny, maybe a little stuffy. Until the second dive of the day. On the boat ride back to the beach we talked about the skills, went over why the triangle navigation test took me an extra minute or two (I had to do the math to get past 360 Deg on the compass three times before I got it straight in my head, he had me start on a heading of 160). We also talked about some of the stuff we saw, they told me what kind of fish were in the big schools I described, and everyone in the boat just chatted. One of the things I'm really starting to love about diving is this: You can gather a boat full of a DM and half a dozen people that are strangers to him and to each other. Before the dive everyone is kind of closed, in their own head, and quiet, but as soon as the dive is over and everyone is back in the boat, everyone is helping each other with gear and wetsuits. Everyone is chatty and loose, everyone is smiling and eager to share that smile and mood with everyone around them. Its a lot of fun to watch a group of people all get into a great mood together!
Once we got back to the beach we had a snack and started briefing for the next dive, the Search and Recovery dive. We started with knots, went over the ones in the PADI book and then Deon showed us a couple tricks with the Figure 8, how to double the line and tie it into a loop, and how to tie a follow-through figure 8, where you tie a loose knot, wrap the end around or through something and then thread the end through the figure 8 again. They seemed like pretty solid knots and the instructor said he wanted us to only use these on the dive. Then we got our gear ready and headed for the boat. This dive was going to be slightly deeper than the last one, 19m instead of 15m. My OW classes were in water less than 7m so every dive I was doing was a new 'deepest' dive for me.
After we rolled into the water and my instructor, again, had to point out my mask strap flopping on top of my head, we emptied our BCs and started to descend. This is where I started noticing that my right ear didn't want to equalize, it felt like there was a bubble or something blocking the air. As soon as it started feeling uncomfortable I signaled that I had ear trouble and ascended a meter or so and continued to try to equalize. After several tries and some kind of hard blowing it 'popped' with a moment of mild pain then seemed ok except for a slight feeling of pressure. I finished the descent slowly, carefully equalizing as I went. It took more effort to equalize that ear but there was no more pain on the way down, still just a slight feeling of pressure, like water in the ear.
Once I made it to the bottom two things really jumped out at me compared to that mornings dive. First was that only 4m deeper everything was a little bigger. The coral were bigger, the fish were bigger, and the trenches between the coral were deeper. The second thing I noticed was that the surge was a lot more pronounced. We took a few minutes and wandered through the coral before we got to the sandy patch where we would do the skill tests. This time the sandy patch was like a flat valley ringed by cliffs and mountains compared to the "forest clearing" feel of the last test spot. We were less than a Km from our last dive site, and only 4m deeper, but it was a dramatically different seascape.
We started with our search patterns and I even found a weight that someone else had lost in the area, the water was pretty clear with 40-50m vis (guessing based on the 30m line we were using), so they went pretty fast and easy. Then we settled in and started securing ropes to the crate of weights that we had brought along.The first knot on each rope was easy, a fast doubled over figure 8 for a neat loop. The second turned out to be a PAIN! the biggest problem was tying the first loose figure 8 without enough line left to loop through the crate handle and still have enough to 'follow-through' the loose knot. This would normally be a minor problem, but as I said earlier, the surge was really moving! I would hold onto the crate and it was pushing me from prone on the sand to completely upside down. Several times we pushed each other back down when the surge flipped us feet up. After 4 or 5 times the amount of time and effort that it would have taken on shore, we finally got the crate rigged and attached to our lift bag. That's when we realized that the exhaust valve was leaking air. It turned out to be a minor thing though, as we just kept adding small bursts of air and moved it to the base of the mooring line and let it settle so we could leave it and do some more sightseeing before finishing the dive.
During the rigging was when my ear started to complain, I could literally feel the surge inside my ear. I tried to equalize, and would feel it work for a moment, then when the next surge hit, it was almost like I could feel a bubble in the ear canal slide out and the pressure would return. As we moved our load to the mooring line it became uncomfortable, but didn't hurt, I knew that we only had 5 or 10 minutes of sightseeing before we would start our ascent so I just bore with it. It pretty much stayed like that for the rest of the dive except for a fast twinge of pain when I was in a narrow between coral heads and the surge hit hard. It distracted me a little bit, but really did little to detract from the dive, I was still surrounded but otherworldly scenes and strangely beautiful creatures. The real highlights of this dive were seeing a parrotfish getting cleaned by half a dozen other little tiny fish, and seeing a juvenile damselfish that was smaller than one of my finger joints, and was such a bright blue with brighter blue spots, that it looked like it was glowing.
We eventually got back to the mooring line and carefully raised our crate as we did our ascent. On the way up I noticed that some of the sand that was suspended in the water was sort of staying in stable little clouds a couple centimeters across. When we got to the surface I asked about them, no one really had any idea what it was but we had a good laugh when I shrugged and said "Probably just parrotfish crap". As we were reviewing the dive in the boat someone asked why specifically we had to use the figure 8 knot, I was impressed when the answer had nothing to do with rigging but instead the instructor said "Most people don't know it, so we can see their ability to concentrate while doing new things underwater instead of familiar ones" he added that with the heavy surge today we all did great.
The next time I saw the friends I was staying with, I found out they had been in an accident in our rental car, and they were all pretty grumpy. As for me, the rest of that day I couldn't shake the feeling of having water in my ear and at one point it even started to ache a little. I rinsed out my sinuses with my netti pot and took an aspirin, that did away with the ache but the watery ear feeling wasn't gone till the next morning. I guess it may have been gone earlier but I lost track of it not long after bed time when Montezuma came around looking for his revenge again. We fought several times that night, but I knew I had more Pepto and ginger so I was unafraid.
Day 3 - http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/ne...fication-mex-day-3-last-dive.html#post4402908
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