Day 3: HUMP DAY!
8 am - meet at the shop, go over course materials, get briefed on 2 dives for the day. These are the tougher ones.
Dive 3 includes descent with stop, valve drills, S drills with swim, OOG diver, ascent up line with OOG diver and 2 stops. Things are starting to stack up and you can tell that the complexity is increasing.
I'd been in the doubles for about 10 dives before the course and agree that any changes made _just_ for the course are going to be problematic. Getting the gear sorted before the course would be highly recommended. Every time I tried to "tweak" something it threw me off enough given the the complexity was increasing.
As we swam out (we were team 2) we heard the debrief and it turned out that a certain diver (I'm not naming names of course, but if you've read everything else you'll know who) sucked his 95's down to 800 psi in a 36 minute dive.
So we were only going to do one dive. I had been stressing about doing the no mask swim because I already missed the mask remove earlier. So to start the day I left my mask off, popped in a reg and stuck my head in the water. Good times, slight brain freeze (44 degree water does that I guess) but not bad. I was feeling better... and now I wouldn't have to do anything with it.
I believe that this was one of our better dives. We worked together, as 2 divers did the drills the third would face the current and hold the team in place, we worked as a group. I was the TC and Diver 2 (this day) had some issues with buoyancy, but we got him back down. Things were a bit clustered but we managed to get through.
I did a valve drill that received a "not all that bad" from Dan and it turned out that at the end of the day one 2 people had gotten the valve drill right and I was one of the two. I didn't mess up my buoyancy too bad during the drills either. Dan commented that for most of us our buoyancy and trim were best during the valve drills and s drills because we weren't thinking about it so much. We felt like we'd become a team. Unfortunately I silted the place out trying to hold folks in place so I decided to call us (mostly myself) Team siltout
Has a nice ring to it, don't you think?
Just before ascending and as Diver 3 was stowing his long hose, i was in the center (TC) and diver 2 was swimming to the upline with us, the 'blue hand of death' came over my shoulder and now I was OOA! A split second glance at Diver 3 on my left and he was looking at his long hose trying to stow it, so diver 2 it was! Donation by Diver 2 was quick and seamless. I actually spat my reg out as I started signaling him and everything went very smooth! In a real life situation I'd have been very happy with the quick response. Dan mentioned that this was a the best s-drill we did that day. We had the general small issue with the ascent and the stops, but we did make stops and our 3 minute ascent was only 5 minutes (maybe 7, I forget, but we didn't do too bad apparently).
The day ended early and people got a chance to get out and do something. We knew we'd have a full final day given that we had to catch up a dive but Dan assured us it was not a big deal and we'd be able to finish no problem.
The other team met us at the waters edge to help out and carry up weight and you just got the sense that we were all working together both within and between the teams. Everyone wanted to ensure the others were going to do ok.
As we were wrapping up Dan asked me if there was any way I could borrow a can light (again, the one I was going to use had broken and wasn't around). He mentioned that I was pretty much going to receive a Rec pass, but that if I could get a light and show him that I could use it and not mess up he thought I'd have a shot at a tech pass. As you may be able to imagine, this made me pretty damn happy. However, I had no way to get a light. Dan then told me I could use his, the bulb had died on him but I could use it if I wanted to try (Of course I did!). Very cool!
Day 3 summary: We had a team. I trusted the other guys to work through whatever we had to work through and knew we'd get it done. It may not be pretty, and we'd probably violate rule 6 a whole bunch, but we'd get the job done. At some point Dan called us 'the superstars'. I'm pretty sure there was sarcasm involved though he did mention post dive that "It's amazing what happens when you turn your brain on". Again, we took this as praise
