Advice on drill, first pool dive..

[Dennismc]

Hello everyone.

I had my first pool dive on Saturday. I would say it went fairly well. Passed but had a couple hiccups.

Main one was being able to remove my mask underwater, replace it and clear it. The first time I attempted this, It took several tries. Finally did it and moved on, at the end of the dive, instructor wanted me to do it again, (no problems with that, as I still want to practice it more before my ow dives)

this time however it was really difficult, and took many tries. I just couldn't get it to clear for me. I think it had a lot to do with I was getting water in past my mouthpiece and would screw with my mental thoughts on it.

I do not have teeth, (dentures), lost them after a really bad snowmobile accident, hit a tree 6 feet up head on at 60mph. I went with out them for so long, hardly wear the false ones. So i had to bite down with my gums to hold the reg in my mouth, and didnt get a great seal around it.

Now once in the water, I have no problem clearing the mask when water gets in it, just when it is completely filled with water. I just couldnt get enough air blown out of the nose to clear it, before I would suck in water.

Other problem was a extra drill, where we left the bcd, and gear on the bottom and swam down to retrieve it. Just couldnt hold my breath long enough to make it down to it. (now this I think is cause i was a smoker for 20 years until a week ago)

Any advice here on either would be great. My OW dives are tenitively planned for first weekend in April at mermet springs, Il.

 

[TSandM]

Well, mask clearing issues are one of the most common problems that new open water students have, so you are not alone! The good news is that you can do a lot of practice to fix this in your kitchen sink or bathtub.

The first step in mastery of mask problems is to learn to control whether your breathing goes through your mouth or your nose. If you are sucking water in from a flooded mask, you are allowing yourself to breathe through your nose when you shouldn't; this is actually pretty easy to fix. Try this exercise: While you are sitting and reading this, put your hand over your mouth. Inflate your mouth so your cheeks puff up. Now, without removing your hand, let the air out through your nose. Then refill your cheeks, and let the air out through your nose. Repeat this until you have identified the change you make in the back of your throat to reroute the air -- this is airway control. Understanding this will make sure you never try to inhale or exhale air where you don't want it to go.

Now, fill your sink with water, and take your snorkel in your mouth. Put your face in the water, and breathe through the snorkel without any mask at all. If you draw air in through your nose and choke, stand up and practice the nose/mouth rerouting exercise again, and then retry. Eventually, you should be able to breathe through the snorkel with your bare face in the water without any difficulty.

Now add the mask. Put your face in the sink, and fill the mask with water. Breathe through the snorkel with a flooded mask. Then lift your face OUT of the water (keep your head over the sink, or this will get messy). Put a finger on each of the upper, outer corners of the mask, and very gently exhale through your nose. Do NOT blow or snort; just exhale as though you were breathing normally. The water in the mask will run out of the bottom, and I can guarantee you that, if you exhale slowly and gently, the mask will be empty before your lungs are

Once this exercise goes well in the sink, try it in the bathtub, lying on your stomach (if your tub will allow that). Don't lift the head entirely out of the water, just go from looking straight down to looking straight ahead. By now, this should be easy.

If you tilt your head back so that the plane of your face goes behind the vertical, water will passively run down the base of your nasopharynx and into your throat. This is a big mistake students make when they are doing their skills in a seated or kneeling position, where their face is already vertical. The instruction to tilt the head back is for a diver who is horizontal in the water, and looking down; that person needs to tilt the head back to get the bottom of the mask to be the lowest point. That is NOT necessary when in an upright position.

Try this, and come back and tell us how it went!

 

[windapp]

My wife had the exact same issue. The problem is that you are trying to clear your mask all in one go. Here is the fix:

First, learn to breath through your regulator comfortably without a mask.
Then, replace your mask, while gently blowing a little air out your nose to prevent the water from being pushed in.
Aim to clear your mask in a minimum of two breaths. More is better for this exercise. Breath in through your mouth, and out through your nose while pushing the top of the mask against your forehead, and looking up a little, but intentionally try not to blow out all the water at once.

Once you have this mastered, you will find that, when you are relaxed, your mask will usually clear in one breath, but it doesn't have to.

 

[CamG]

Greetings Dennis first and for most relax you are going to be able to work this out.
It took me a week of practice as TSandM has described with a extra pool session to comfortably pass the skills requirement.
if you follow the steps Lynne has detailed it will help you drastically.

Not knowing for sure I would guess that you could be a nose breather like myself.
For those like us we struggle a bit not breathing through our noses when we are performing mask skills.
I started at home and wore my mask around with the nose pocket full of water.
My wife had no issues with the mask I was a wreck!
Thus my determination was steadfast so I literally wore the mask for hours and in the shower till I could flood it totally and be relaxed.
Let me tell you it took a while!

When the pool session came around I performed the skills not without a few sputters but enough to pass the skills.
NOT MASTERY of the skills.
OW dive #1 went off with not a glitch as with the other dives.
What I found was the skills were much easier for me in fresh water.
I am pretty sensitive to chlorine so it added to the issues.

My instructor was more than that to me he became my mentor as he taught me what skill mastery really means.
He took the extra time to encourage, assist, and in the end my weaknesses became my strengths.
When I was training in Cave class I had a moment in a air share exercise that we are required to use no mask recover our spare mask and navigate our way out.
These skills are priceless and mastery is just that.
YOU WILL USE them and THEY WILL be important in the future.

The key to mask issues is being able to relax breath around a bit of water when needed.
These take time to re-train our brains so be patient with yourself, commit to the training, be purposeful and safe at all times.
You can and will overcome anxieties with practice if you are determined.
In hindsight my struggles MADE me the diver I am today!
They taught me that struggle is not always bad but can drive us to drill until mastery is achieved.

Some of the best divers I have met struggled here and there to achieve mastery.
Take heart and see this through what you encounter along the way is a sense of confidence / empowerment!
A new world awaits enjoy your training and have fun.
Safe training and dives,

CamG Keep Diving....Keep Training....Keep Learning!

 

[TSandM]

Another important thing to realize is that you are not blowing the water out of the mask -- you are simply REPLACING the water with air. If you think about the volume in your lungs, and the volume in a mask, you will realize that you ought to be able to clear your mask several times over with the amount of air in a breath. In fact, rebreather divers learn to clear their masks without losing any air into the water at all! Once you understand this, you stop the "take a huge deep breath and BLAST" behavior, which makes mask clearing harder and also has pernicious effects on your buoyancy control.

 

[randini]

On the mask drill, a lot of great advice above. Also check that the skirt is sealing against your face and not getting caught on the hood or getting twisted. No matter where the water gets in from, it will fill from the bottom. During my DM training, every OW class I assisted in it seems at least one student got a piece of the mask skirt on the outside over the rim of the hood and struggled to clear the mask.

Congrats on quitting the smokes. I didn't smoke full time for 20 years, but off and on over the last 20+ and last year I quit (after a ~5 year stint as a serious smoker). Stick with it! For me, the first month was the worst (here in Chile everybody smokes and smokers are everywhere so the smell was always around). After that it was all downhill.

A lot of breath holding is psychological and if for whatever reason you think you won't make it, you won't. On a a positive note, only 3 days after quitting smoking your lungs should have begun to repair themselves and making breathing easier. It will continue to get easier every day. With a week under your belt now, and even more by the time you have your next session, if you give it another go I think you will be able to make it.

See if you can get some extra time in the pool before your next session to practice snorkeling. Just practice floating at the surface being calm and breathing through the snorkel. Once you are calm, concentrate on your breathing: breathe using your using your diaphragm (i.e. try to inhale by pushing your gut down/out rather than just expanding your chest), and make sure your breathing is rhythmic (shoot for long slow breathing cycles). Once you are clam and have your breathing under control, practice making some breath hold dives to the bottom. Exhale completely using your diaphragm and take in a long deep breath. Start the breath by using the diaphragm to get air into the bottom of your lungs first then expand your chest, hold it and dive down to the bottom. Once you can do that, keep pushing your self to dive down and swim along the bottom a little further each time and before you know it, just getting down to your gear and securing your regulator will be a piece of cake.

 

[261311]

The good news is (for your bcd doff/don drill) is you don't actually need to hold your breath to make it down, that makes it significantly harder given you're probably buoyant already and air will only make that harder. Hyperventilate for 3-4 breathes, take a small breath on the last and try again. This will help get excess carbon dioxide out of your airways and lungs making the urge to breathe a bit further off in the distance. That way you're technically not holding your breath so much as taking a bit of sample air to the bottom to clear the reg/ exhale on the way down while staying the want to breathe.

As far as your accident goes, that sucks but the regulator mouth piece is to help hold the reg in your mouth, the seal is formed by your lips, I'm unsure if this changes things significantly however based on the fact that I haven't experienced what you have to daily so apologies. Sounds like it's easier said than it is done but just slow down, relax and have fun in your lessons. If you're able to get to the level of comfort where things are just frustrating or inconvenient because they take an extra second to do this is good. You can focus on tasks as easier I find if they're comfortable with their surroundings. Whether it will work for you I'm unsure but I find no matter what I'm doing in scuba I can center myself quickly if I ask for a moment (if someone is waiting on me, otherwise I just take one), focus on my breathing and relax, I usually close my eyes since it seems to make breathing that more pronounced in its sensation for me. Just reminds me that life is good and I still am breathing, then I can start to slowly sort out whatever task I need to perform at the time.

How are you doing your mask clears? I'll second what others are saying about you just needing time working without a mask so you can feel water in/ around your nose. To me it's incredibly discomforting so getting used to it enough to where I can "deal with it" was important. Again, I just focused on breathing and held onto my mask tight. If I was having an issue with bubbles up my nose, I'd plug it just so I can get myself refocused then when I was ready, exhale out once through it (or continuously until I replaced my mask). If you're having issues with the reg because of your medical issue, make sure you can form a seal without having to hold the reg but know how you can reform that seal on the fly (you may have to end up wearing some prosthetic chompers or have a modified mouthpiece for your own rig once you're cert for comfort) so that you can return to the basic level of comfortable breathing. After that everything will follow through.

 

[TUTs_mama]

To address the difficulty in holding your breath while retrieving you gear, yes stopping smoking will greatly address that, but you also want to improve your cardiovascular health so that you can handle the stress of holding your breath while performing tasks. Start doing light cardio, walking or swimming, to build up your endurance and you will see great improvements in this area.

 

[kelemvor]

I got certified with NAUI. They don't have the retrieve your BCD drill, but they did have a 60' underwater swim that I struggled with. I went through the lengthy class and still was unable to do it until I hired a swim instructor. It actually only took me about 10 minutes to get it with the right instruction. Basically, I was not used to holding my breath for that long and was giving up. Once I got over the fear, I did the drill twice back to back and could have gone a good bit further than 60. Try practicing the swim to the bottom and back up without messing with the gear a few times perhaps.

It may or may not be an issue for you, but I'm about 6lbs positive with no gear on at all. It is a bit more difficult for me to swim down to the bottom of a pool than it would be for some. If that's the case with you, perhaps you'd be allowed to use some weights to get closer to neutral?

On the mask drills, I didn't struggle much but what I did to get comfortable was just took it off. Hung out in the pool on the ledge with the regulator and no mask for a while until I was totally comfortable. It only took a few minutes - after that I was able to do the mask clearing drill no sweat. If your instructor's facility allows it, get some extra pool time in after classes practicing. I found practicing with just my buddy a lot easier than doing it in front of a class of 8 people and made a good friend in the process!

In both cases for me it was all about becoming comfortable with something that I wasn't used to doing.

 

[tlj3071]

I had the same problem with no teeth, and it wasn't much fun trying to either hold the reg in my mouth or - especially air-share drills using my buddy's integrated-air 2nd during my OW cert confined and open water dives. The solution for me was to get implanted posts onto which a full denture snaps in place. It wasn't cheap, but was worth every dollar spent.