Chris (our assistant training officer) went to Ecclestone Delph the other Sunday with Stuart to do some training.There first lesson was to be Compass and use of DSMB.
The first part of the lesson was a dry practice in the carpark, Taking a bairing on a bush and walking to it seemed quite simple to Stuart, even counting his paces whilst following the reciprical bairing was easy peasy. After some simple maths (how to follow a triangular patern) they then went on to discuss how to deploy a delayed surface marker buoy (DSMB). At this point Stuart took out his latest purchase, a self inflating DSMB. " Oh no, your not using that, you need to know how to inflate one the manual way" said Chris "you can use this spare one of mine".
After kitting up they hiked to the other end of the lake to enter the water at the beach, there are some buoys down at that end that are not too far apart ( it makes the exercise a little easyer that way). With the backwards, forwards, ups, downs and counting fin strokes Stuart soon found out that using a compass underwater wasnt "easy peasy", you can concentrate so much on the compass that you forget about everthing else. Once learnt its a skill that needs to be practised (like all diving skills).
When it came to the DSMB part of the lesson Chris demonstrated how to deploy one, then Stuart did a text book copy of it, they then went up the line and did a safty stop at 6M for one minute.
Their second dive included using a distance line whilst on a simulated decompresion dive, but before they entered the water there was the small matter of working out the diveplan, making up a dive conduct slate (using BSAC 88 tables) and working out there gas usage. This done they entered the water, dropped down a shot line and compleated the line laying exercise. Jet plain, armoured vehicle and toy car they made their way back to the shot line. Ascending the shot line they reached their 6m deco stop and waited for 6 minutes. I hope Stuart was not put off doing deco dives as he said the six minutes felt more like six hours.
All in all a good training day.
