Spousal support? Mutual support? This being attributed to the man who said to me when I came home from my Fundies checkout exam, "I want you to promise me no more training dives for the summer?"
The biggest challenges . . . For me, there are two. Ascents. Hitting stops precisely and holding them a given amount of time. Early on, I gave up on the time part. Just hitting the depth and holding it was hard enough. For a long time, I let Kirk run the deco all the time, because I couldn't process monitoring time to depth and time at depth, and holding depth and trim and keeping track of Kirk. I'm still not very good at it, but it's slowly getting better. The stops aren't precise, but I hold whatever depth I stop at until I'm told to move. I still can't run the deco. I CAN wind up a spool while ascending, and that's a step forward.
The other challenge is midwater/limited visibility. In our checkout dive, we had to swim 30 feet without a mask. I've worked on this, and did fine during the swim. But when I replaced the mask and cleared it, and opened my eyes to find it hadn't cleared, I lost orientation again and ended up in the silt. This is going to take a lot of continued work. The problem pre-existed Fundies and persists.
When I took Fundies, I failed to meet standards in many places. I couldn't maintain my buoyancy or trim under task loading, and I've improved that immensely. I had very poor situational awareness, and that's gotten much, much better. The actual skills were just the missing frosting on a very poorly baked cake.
It really has taken diligent practice, and it's taken a lot of diving. Every dive I've done since the class in November has been done with an awareness of my deficiencies and a fierce determination to improve them. Even a completely fun dive in the Caribbean could be an opportunity to practice buoyancy, or improve situational awareness. Every ascent from every dive was an opportunity to polish buoyancy, and the direct ascents (which have been relatively few outside of training dives) have been clear occasions to work on accuracy and stability at given depths.
Useful skills? ALL OF THEM. If there is any one major lesson from having taken this class and eventually passed it, it's that nothing that is taught in Fundies is anything but basic diving. It's not elite or esoteric or amazing . . . it's what we should ALL be able to do. It's passing through the underwater environment without disturbing it, and without disturbing the visibility for yourself or others. It's being able to maneuver yourself in the water so that you can be where you want to be, when you want to be there. It's remaining aware of what's going on in your environment, beginning with your partner but extending to what's happening in the water around you. It's having your basic emergency responses honed well enough to be useful. It's nothing extraordinary, and in some ways, I'm ashamed of how long it took to master what was in the class. But I'm happy I did it, and I can say that my dives now are so incredibly more fun and more enjoyable than they were before I took the class. I now feel as though I can be a partner in dives where I was a dependent before. I think Bob can testify to that.
But the biggest accomplishment or acquisition from having taken Fundies was finding a dive buddy -- a teammate -- with whom to practice and build a partnership. "Buddy" is an odd term for a strange relationship that builds between people who dive together, who build a trust and a degree of communication. Two lives that intersect that perhaps wouldn't otherwise -- but my guess is that many people on this board understand what I'm talking about. You just feel comfortable underwater with someone whose behavior you know; whose skills you know and have confidence in; who you know has your back, and with whom you can share the little amazements that come with every dive, as the ocean offers up its marvels. It's a wonderful thing, being dive buddies.
