The Fundamentals of Better Diving with Ed Gabe

[Tanked Monkey]

Excellent writeup. I'm glad you enjoyed the class. I was the "video guy" for that first day at the quarry. I enjoyed diving with you guys.

Mike

 

[b1gcountry]

Thanks for helping out on Friday. My wife and I enjoyed meeting you. If you're ever headed to Mermet, let us know. I'll be willing to do valve drills with you all dive on the platform...

Tom

 

[Divin'Papaw]

Great report!

Coming from out of town, it looks like you arranged the course for Thu-Sun. How did that work out? Was the course all day for the 4 days? What time did you wrap up Sunday?

I'm interesting in learning more about the logistics.

 

[b1gcountry]

Great report!

Coming from out of town, it looks like you arranged the course for Thu-Sun. How did that work out? Was the course all day for the 4 days? What time did you wrap up Sunday?

I'm interesting in learning more about the logistics.

First challenge Logistics-wise was getting the class scheduled. The price was $500 with 3-4 students in class, and $750 if you only had two. My wife works some weekends, and Ed wanted to schedule the class once the water warmed up. I wanted to do it late March, but it didn't happen until late June.

Ed offers two options for location; You can drive to LeGrange, KY, and do the class there, or you can bring Ed in to where you are. We didn't have any place local, so instead of driving to Mermet, and paying both our lodging, and Ed's lodging, we just drove the extra hour and a half to KY. Doing it in KY was also nice because the quarry was only 10min away from the hotel, and Ed knew how to handle the logistics of tank fills, the swim test, etc.

For the actual class, we drove in on Wednesday. I took a half day from work, and my wife was off. We started Thursday morning at 9am meeting at the Super 8 lobby. We went to a local restaurant for lecture, broke for lunch at noon, lectured for a couple more hours, then went for a swim test. We came back to the restaurant, and ate some dinner while Ed finished up the days lecture. We headed back to the Super 8 and showed Ed our regs and BP/W setups. Ed adjusted the fit a little bit, and told us to change one or two things. He also made suggestions based on what works for him, but told us we were also free to use our own way. I decided to try out all his suggested changes for the class to see how I liked them. The only one I've changed back to so far was using a fixed D-Ring on my left hip (welded to the keeper at 90*). I couldn't get a hang of re-clipping the SPG to a moving target in dry gloves even though it worked without the gloves in class.

After the gear setup, we went to bed, and met next morning at 8:30 to head to the quarry. It took obscenely long to get in the water since we were getting everything setup for the first time, and Ed was showing us all kings of things like how to tie a boltsnap, setting up a bungee to hold the inflator hose. He also went through all the drills we would be doing. We didn't get into the water until 12:39, and did a 40 min dive before we had to break for my bladder. 20 minutes later we were back in the water, and went up and down until 3:26. We broke for the day and went back for video review. Then had dinner IIRC.

Day three my computer logged 6 dives starting at 10:53, and going until 3:30. Ed packed up our tanks for fills and we went back to Super 8 for video review, and a little more lecture. Ed asked us what time we needed to leave on Sunday. We all decided that we didn't want to cut the day short because we were learning so much, and it was packed tight enough already, so Kathy and I booked the Super 8 for another night. We also decided to meet a little later at the quarry to give Ed a little more time to sleep (he would be up until midnight filling tanks.)

Sunday we hit the water at 9:48. My computer logged 10 dives lasting until 3:12PM. We went back again for video review, dinner, final evaluations, and question/answer. We could have cut it shorter, and left that night, but we were tired anyway, and went to sleep early. The guy from Indy went back that night. We broke around 8PM, so it wasn't terribly bad.


...so in other words, we went 4 full days with travel the day before and the day after, but my job was a little slow at the time, and I could manage missing the extra day. We could have easily worked it out so we had time to drive home that night, or we could have pushed ourselves and drove home home anyway, but getting the good rest was nice.

Tom

 

[Tanked Monkey]

Thanks for helping out on Friday. My wife and I enjoyed meeting you. If you're ever headed to Mermet, let us know. I'll be willing to do valve drills with you all dive on the platform...

Tom

Glad to be there and meet you guys. I'll look you up when I head to Mermet in the future. And if you ever want to check out our submerged buildings at Marthas, I'll join ya.

Mike

 

[CuriousRambler]

Great summary! I've been wondering about fundies, and what all was involved...Probably the best write-up I've run across online!

 

[TSandM]

Probably the best write-up I've run across online!

I dunno . . . Ours was funnier

 

[SparticleBrane]

Ed is a fantastic instructor; I really enjoyed my class with him last year.