ERP
Guest
Over the weekend I attended a scooter workshop in Monterey.
The short version for those with short attention spans == Ton's of Fun
==.
Andrew Georgitis was the instructor and Marc Hall helped out with video. There were 5 students, one who oned a gavin 3 who rented them and myself using my little voyager.
The course format is fairly similar to fundamentals, an evening of classroom, followed by two days of diving and debriefs.
The classroom time covered breaking down the Gavin, general maintenance, predive checks, the skills we were going to cover and some basics of dive management when scooters are involved.
The first day we balanced the scooters, and covered the basic skills, concentrating on the adjustment of the tow cord, and the riding position. In all the excitement, we managed to take one Gavin into the water sans O-Ring, and flood it with salt water. In some ways it turned out to be fortuitous, we got to see how you would deal with a flooded scooter for real, rather than just in theory. The scooter in question survived, with just a damaged reed switch.
The Second days dives concentrated on airshares and dealing with a runaway scooter. Our first airshare with a scooter was a comedy of errors, beween the towcord, my light cord and the long hose I seemed to be finding many new ways to tie knots, about the only positive in the whole thing were that Scott got air and we did eventually get into a towing position. The second one was somewhat better, but it brought home how different even basic skills are with a scooter.
Once we'd completed the skills we used the remainder of our burn time to have some fun with the scooters and a lot of fun it was.
I'd recommend this course to anyone considering it, I know that a couple of the students in our course had done some scootering before and they found it as enjoyable and informing as I did.
The short version for those with short attention spans == Ton's of Fun
==.Andrew Georgitis was the instructor and Marc Hall helped out with video. There were 5 students, one who oned a gavin 3 who rented them and myself using my little voyager.
The course format is fairly similar to fundamentals, an evening of classroom, followed by two days of diving and debriefs.
The classroom time covered breaking down the Gavin, general maintenance, predive checks, the skills we were going to cover and some basics of dive management when scooters are involved.
The first day we balanced the scooters, and covered the basic skills, concentrating on the adjustment of the tow cord, and the riding position. In all the excitement, we managed to take one Gavin into the water sans O-Ring, and flood it with salt water. In some ways it turned out to be fortuitous, we got to see how you would deal with a flooded scooter for real, rather than just in theory. The scooter in question survived, with just a damaged reed switch.
The Second days dives concentrated on airshares and dealing with a runaway scooter. Our first airshare with a scooter was a comedy of errors, beween the towcord, my light cord and the long hose I seemed to be finding many new ways to tie knots, about the only positive in the whole thing were that Scott got air and we did eventually get into a towing position. The second one was somewhat better, but it brought home how different even basic skills are with a scooter.
Once we'd completed the skills we used the remainder of our burn time to have some fun with the scooters and a lot of fun it was.
I'd recommend this course to anyone considering it, I know that a couple of the students in our course had done some scootering before and they found it as enjoyable and informing as I did.
