Skills to practice Wreck/Deep Dives

[Wibble]

Core skills. This means being completely still in the water and moving using only your fins.

Redundancy. Deeper and wrecks means you need to ensure you've plenty of redundant gas should you be snagged or you get a free-flow or suchlike. This means looking at twinsets/doubles or sidemount then practising and mastering shutdows.


Looks like I might be the first to say this...

Your questions are really excellent. It shows you're thinking about the future and moving to more challenging diving. Consider looking at a course such as GUE Fundimentals. You don't have to dive with them afterwards, but your skills will be immensely improved as a result. Everything they teach is pretty much a pre-requisite to moving towards technical diving, or simply being an excellent recreational diver.


Good luck. It's a longer term goal, but opens up so many possibilities. It's fun too.

 

[ScubaWithTurk]

Advanced Wreck is a tech class. All the instructors I know that teach it require the student to be in doubles/sidemount/rebreather and be deco certified minimum. It’s not a class you take after having dived one year with no tech background.

And what the others said about no silting propulsion - frog kick, etc.

Advanced wreck is not necessarily a technical course. It might be under whatever agency you and the instructors you know teach and train under, but some training organizations have advanced wreck and technical wreck as separate courses.

For instance, RAID offers a wreck course with zero penetration. It allows you to swim around the wreck, helps in identifying possible hazards, wreck conservation and preservation, wreck dive planning and more.

The Advanced Wreck program can be done by anyone with the advanced cert and it is a more in-depth course. It usually involves at least one full day of dry land drills for laying and following line. This includes black out drills and lost line drills.

So for the sake of the OP, consider the agency and most importantly, the instructor. There really is no need to be tech certified depending on the depth of the wrecks you want to penetrate as well as the length of penetration.

As for the skills:

1. Long hose gas sharing

2. Line Laying (wraps and tie-offs)

I suggest a good instructor for those. You will also need to learn the different kicks everyone mentioned above.

Work on buoyancy!! I love getting as close to the bottom of the ocean or pool as I can and hovering there without touching the bottom. Then using just my breath, moving up in the water column to a specified depth and holding that with less than 6" of movement. It takes practice but if you are penetrating wrecks. outstanding buoyancy is the first foundation for success.


Having said all that, I do suggest you look at different gear configurations. Single tank backmount can be done but there are configs that are better suited for penetration, especially if you plan on working your way up to tighter restrictions. This is where sidemount really shines IMO.

You can also get trained in a twinset but personally, I dislike twins for wreck penetration. I prefer to be able to see where I may have a failure (such as bubbles from a first stage) as opposed to running through shuts downs or relying on my buddy to point it out to me.

OOG drills are also essential. I tell all my open water students that they should do an OOG drill at some point on every single dive they do after the course is complete. It is the key to safety and most rarely, if ever practice it after the course.

Keep diving and let us know how you are progressing. This place really is a wonderful resource but you may have to sift through tough critics from time to time (like daily lol) Your thick skin will come in handy here.

 

[Wibble]

There’s massive differences in wreck dives according to what you do on the wreck — sorry for stating the bleeding obvious.


Alas one needs to post this as a reminder of what can happen if you push things too far. The Scylla is a frigate which was deliberately sunk as an attraction out of Plymouth, England Some 20 years ago. With loads of holes cut into her, she's an easy dive for most. Unfortunately she has claimed the lives of several divers who venture into parts of the ship that are beyond their experience, training, skills with the wrong equipment.

Two years ago three divers ventured into the engine room without laying lines and kicked up the silt. Two died and the third managed to wriggle out of a very small hole and lived. Their bodies weren’t recovered for a few weeks.

None of us were there and we can only speculate on what happened so we can try to learn from this tragedy.

IMHO just be bloody careful and never push things, especially if there’s some peer pressure. Wrecks are random places and stuff happens. Make sure you can cope with most challenges and ALWAYS have sufficient gas to allow plenty of time to get out.


A random event that happened to me…. On a large WW1 cruiser on its side and had penetrated into a deck where there was a hatch. Was careful to back-reference, looking all around to familiarise myself with that location. Was a largish hatch lie a door (wreck on its side), about 1m50/5ft square and dark in there. I had a twinset with plenty of gas, decent primary torch and backup torches, spools of line, etc.

So I poked my head in to shine my torch around to get the lie of the land as it were before going inside.

Whilst hovering there and looking around my bubbles had dislodged a slab of the "ceiling" above me — the metal plate was delaminating— which flew down inches from my head like Madame La Guillotine. Gosh I thought, glad that’s not going to crash into me. Then another slab came slicing down.

Sod that I thought. It’s the ship saying For you Tommy, ze war is over. I backed out and left that behind.

The lesson is that a rebreather would have been better than blowing bubbles

 

[Tigerpaw]

I think the most important skill with wreck diving is learning to deal with silt not avoiding it. If you're going into wrecks silt is inevitable sooner or later and until you learn to deal with silt you're never going to be comfortable. The way to deal with silt is to make controlled dives in poor vis on guide lines. The more you dive in poor vis the better.

So do you stay on the guide line or do you kindda wait and see if it settles? But YES those are the things I'm wanting to be exposed to or practice, so as not to be caught off guard and wondering what in the world just happened.

 

[Tigerpaw]

Core skills. This means being completely still in the water and moving using only your fins.

Redundancy. Deeper and wrecks means you need to ensure you've plenty of redundant gas should you be snagged or you get a free-flow or suchlike. This means looking at twinsets/doubles or sidemount then practising and mastering shutdows.


Looks like I might be the first to say this...

Your questions are really excellent. It shows you're thinking about the future and moving to more challenging diving. Consider looking at a course such as GUE Fundimentals. You don't have to dive with them afterwards, but your skills will be immensely improved as a result. Everything they teach is pretty much a pre-requisite to moving towards technical diving, or simply being an excellent recreational diver.


Good luck. It's a longer term goal, but opens up so many possibilities. It's fun too.

Thank you, great advice, for the time being I'll keep working my core skills. While I enjoyed this first year, it sure was expensive to get set up and started but I took my time. That being said, it'll take some time to save up extra gear/redundancies.

 

[Tigerpaw]

Hello everyone, thanks for your replies, they all have been helpful. So kicks will be my focus at first. Can these different types of kicks be practiced in a pool AND if so can I practice without all my gear? OR is it better to gear up and head to the lake?

 

[Robert H. Diver]

Hello everyone, thanks for your replies, they all have been helpful. So kicks will be my focus at first. Can these different types of kicks be practiced in a pool AND if so can I practice without all my gear? OR is it better to gear up and head to the lake?

You can start practicing your kicks on a table or hanging your legs off the end of your bed, but absolutely you can do them all in a pool at first.

 

[Robert H. Diver]

Free Training | 7 h 04 min split over 49 videos | sidemounting.com

Sign up for this free online training. Listen to all the different kick videos.

 

[ScubaWithTurk]

So do you stay on the guide line or do you kindda wait and see if it settles? But YES those are the things I'm wanting to be exposed to or practice, so as not to be caught off guard and wondering what in the world just happened.

Stay on the line! The problem with silt in a wreck can be that there is no water flowing through the wreck. Of course this depends on where you have penetrated but with zero water movement and fine silt, it can hang there for hours and hours before it clears up.

Hello everyone, thanks for your replies, they all have been helpful. So kicks will be my focus at first. Can these different types of kicks be practiced in a pool AND if so can I practice without all my gear? OR is it better to gear up and head to the lake?

Oh yes! I did a lot of practice in a pool. Some of it with no gear at all. Just a mask, snorkel and fins. You can even practice the frog kick on your back. It is a good way to make sure you are not dropping your knees in the kick cycle. If your knees break the surface, try again.

Helicopter turns are harder at the surface due to the need to push water with one fin and pull with the other. You may not get much of a turn on the surface but it can be done. Another option is to not wear your gear but rather, leave a cylinder at the side of the pool with a longhose on it.

When I have more time I will find some of the good Youtube videos that give kick demonstrations. There are a few out there but also a few that aren't worth watching or emulating.

 

[Wibble]

So kicks will be my focus at first. Can these different types of kicks be practiced in a pool AND if so can I practice without all my gear? OR is it better to gear up and head to the lake?

There's a set of kicking techniques to be worked on. First is the frog kick as this is very efficient as the thrust is directed backwards, not up/downwards and kicking up the silt.

From that you develop the helicopter turn which is kind of one leg doing a frog kick, the other doing a back kick.

The back kick is the hardest to master and by far the weakest kick. Arguably it's one of the most useful to stop your forward motion and manoever backwards.

The easiest to master is the Flutter Kick. This is with your knees bent at 90 degrees and the thrust coming from straightening the leg from 90 to 45 degrees --- not to be confused with the flappy-leg-kick of the same name and beloved of recreational divers. Has someone a decent YouTube video showing this?


All can be practised in the pool, a snorkel can help. When mastered you don't need fins to do those kicks (obviously less efficiently than with fins).