You'll get a kick out of this: The videographer from yesterday was a woman who is a TDI/IANTD instructor. We had a bunch of non-diving related stuff in common and were shooting the breeze in the classroom during the evening, when I said, "Can I ask you a female kind of question?" She said, "Sure." And I said, "You showed up this morning wearing makeup . . . and you still have makeup on." She said, "Yeah, and . . . ?" I said, "Where did you find a mascara that doesn't dissolve in salt water and run into your eyes and sting?" At which point all my fellow classmates were rolling their eyes and groaning . . .
There were some pretty funny moments to enjoy -- or not -- during the video review. At one point, Steve signals me and one of my teammates: YOU and YOU buddy up and air share. So I turn to my teammate, but he isn't looking at me. I wait and he doesn't look up. Finally, I kind of wave my hand down where he's looking and he looks up, and I signal OOA. He just looks at me. I wait a few seconds, and signal again. He mirrors the signal. I am now totally confused . . . did he not get straight which of us is supposed to be OOA? Or is he telling me he can't start the skill until he has his buoyancy sorted out, which is something we are allowed to do? So I wait, and nothing happens. So I signal OOA again, and he has a perplexed expression and mirrors it back to me. At this point, the Avenging Angel descends, signals me to hold, and swims rapidly toward my buddy, spitting out his regulator and flailing his hands and repeatedly signalling OUT OF AIR OUT OF AIR OUT OF AIR!!!!! At that point, the light goes on in my buddy's head and he proceeds to complete a pretty decent air share drill. You watch it on the video and you see two totally confused people -- he thought I was signalling buoyancy, and I thought he was signalling out of air . . . An object lesson in literally getting your signals straight. There was never ANY doubt about what STEVE was saying . . .
It was also pretty amusing on the video when a troop of other divers proceeds to swim right through the middle of the class -- despite the upline and the clearly marked course. You wonder what they were thinking.
The standards for satisfactory completion of skills are high. It is not enough, as Rick says, to do the skill. You must do the skill AND maintain buoyancy and trim within pretty narrow lines, AND maintain acceptable (which means darned good) buddy awareness. A perfectly performed skill with perceptual narrowing does not pass, and reverting to a vertical position in the middle of an air share doesn't either (she says, wincing). A perfectly performed skill with good buoyancy and buddy awareness is going to get ragged on if your gear isn't properly stowed, or your tank valve cover is floating up and creating a potential entanglement hazard.
So part of this learning over time, I think, is training your eye -- learning to SEE more than, for example, simply identifying your buddy's whereabouts. And I think that might be part of the reason why you get some of the snide remarks about other divers' equipment . . . If you train your eye to spot anything hanging, loose or improperly rigged, it's becomes a visual dissonance when you see it. Of course, that doesn't excuse sneering at divers who have made other decisions, and I will attempt to refrain from doing so
The last thing I am going to say is, having now taken the class, I understand why everybody keeps telling people who ask questions, "Take the class." I think in some ways the most valuable lessons from the last three days are the hardest even to try to explain -- concepts which are, as yet for me, not perfectly gelled, having to do with integrating everything, from pre-dive planning to skills performance to team function, into a seamless whole which leaves few, if any, holes for error to sneak through.
Such an approach may seem excessively anal for someone like me, who wants to dive to look at the fishes, and certainly at the beginning, it feels rigid and artificial to an extent. But I suspect if one makes a habit of doing things this way, it wouldn't take long for it just to feel comfortable and normal. My father, who was an airline pilot for almost 30 years, never got in any airplane, including his own, without completing his checklists, and not from memory, either. This is diving with a similar ethic.
Well, that's my last blast from Fundies, and now you will hear nothing from me for a month, as I observe Bob's 30-day post Fundies quarantine
