What should I practice?

[Dr Neil]

Besides all of the suggestions from other posters (all are great by the way), I would suggest to dive in as many conditions as you can. A diver may have hundreds of dives, but when all of them are in gin clear water in a bathing suit, that same diver may have difficulties diving in some other water condition.

I see this especially in training new aquarium divers. We have new volunteer divers who join the team with a pocketful of qualifications and an impressive record of logged dives but get in an 8 foot tank and absolutely flounder.

The bottom line to all of this is spending quality time in the water and reflecting on the good, the bad, and the ugly part of each dive. The truly serious diver becomes a "student of diving." So out and dive and in your spare time read all of the great links provided in this thread!

 

[lord.harshil]

Great suggestions guys, thanks a million!

Things to do :

1. Practice trim, skills and buoyancy.
2. Improve SA
3. Read a lot
4. Rack up dives in a lot of environments, not just in trunks on a shallow reef =) I think UK will provide me with lots of opportunities to dive in cold (ie drysuit) conditions and I can only assume the currents are fairly strong around the coast (it is after all exposed to the ocean) and people tell me the viz is not quite as good as malaysia =P

I shall work on these. Any drills to focus on? SMB deployment, a bit of practice with lines (just managing them in trim is difficult at the moment without entangling myself). Any more?

 

[dbulmer]

One more suggestion!
You might want to consider joing a dive club BSAC or SAA. This puts you in touch with local divers ie local knowledge and source of buddies - you might like to try
CUUEG ::: Home ::: News

John Kendall is active in that club I believe.

 

[RonFrank]

From out of the Blue! Focus less on advancing quickly, and more on enjoying the experience. You are young. Get a few hundred dives in, and then re-evaluate your goals. You seem to want to go 100 MPH, and maybe 75 is enough.

Training is good, but it seems some folks train more than they dive! Experience is a mighty teacher, so go with that along with other endeavors.

 

[TSandM]

Although I gather it won't be relevant, I have met Gideon and watched him teaching a tech class. He's a very good, very motivated instructor, and people who have taken classes from him have NEVER complained of not getting their money's worth.

People have given you good advice, but I'll try to boil it down to a nutshell: You want to build control of your buoyancy, trim, position and situational awareness while tolerating increasing task-loading. So the first thing is to try to make those four things absolutely unconscious. While you're DMing, you can work on hovering without moving anything. On other dives, you can practice simple things like mask remove and replace, and have your buddy give you feedback on how well you maintain your buoyancy, trim, and position (on a lot of skills, people unconsciously kick while doing them, and kick themselves out of touch with their team). You say you have difficulty doing a helicopter turn in trim -- there's something that's easy to practice a lot.

For situational awareness, ask your buddies to help. When they see you distracted and not paying attention, they can go "out of air" -- it's a great reminder that you aren't globally aware. (We do this to each other all the time.) It's also great to practice air-sharing, because it is task loading and really REQUIRES you to maintain your buoyancy and position and communication well.

Shooting a bag is a great, useful skill, and another way to occupy yourself with task-loading that will tempt you to lose position and awareness. But it's only useful if your buddies can help you realize that you've gotten too task-focused. (Most situational awareness exercises aren't very useful unless somebody else is monitoring them, because the essence of poor SA is that the diver affected is unaware of the problem.)

Anyway, none of this is agency-specific, or even tech diving specific. Good divers can solve problems underwater, and maintain their basic skills under stress.

 

[lord.harshil]

I've been reading as much as I can about tech diving and the different philosophies and in the process I happened to find out that John Kendall (he's big in DIR I think) lives in the same town that I'll be heading to in UK in october! =D

Any idea if he's on this forum?

 

[dbulmer]

Yes - his scubaboard name is ... johnkendall

 

[TSandM]

He is, although he doesn't post much. Screen name is johnkendall.

 

[lord.harshil]

Sweet. I love this site

 

[Jasonmh]

And if you can't reach him on here, his email address is: john@gue.com