UTD Essentials Class/Dive Report - My "formal" training begins

[ligersandtions]

I don't know how many people check out the UTD subforum (the last post was in May...) and since I've gotten a couple requests for an Essentials report, I figured I'd put it in the general subforum.

Like my Hawaii report, it's long-winded (I always am!)....if you don't want to read the whole thing but are still interested, there's a "conclusions" section at the bottom that will give you cliffs notes


I had the pleasure of starting my "formal" DIR dive training with a UTD Essentials class (8/26 - 8/30). The instructors were Andy Huber and Maciek Arkuszewski. Below is a recap of my experience.

Day 1

The first day of Essentials was the “figure out where the shop is located, get all the paper work straightened out and handed in, and introductions” day. Challenge number 1: navigate my way to Venice, figure out where the hell to park without doing anything illegal, and make my way into the shop. If you’ve been diving with me, you know my underwater navigation is pretty pathetic – shouldn’t be that big of a surprise that my topside navigation is also not that great! But OADC was easy to find; however, parking was not. After rounding the block a couple times and trying not to go down one-way streets the wrong way, I finally found a place I could park without hitting any other cars or being in a red zone.

Made it into the shop, handed in my paperwork, and then on to the introductions. Each person talked about their diving, including their best and worst dives ever, what we wanted to get out of the class, and what our goals were. Turns out, with just over a year of experience, I was the second newest diver – I had not expected that!

Then we started with the course work. We mostly talked about stuff we should already know at this point, as open water divers. The most interesting discussion was talking about the different “laws” (Law of Primacy/Readiness/Exercise/Recency/Intensity/Effect). It was, and still is, absolutely mind-blowing to think that some people are lucky enough to start diving like this – not on their knees, not depending on a computer, safe and competent from the start, etc – and don’t have to break bad habits later on.

Day 2

The second day was spent mostly on Gas Management. Being a huge nerd, I’ve already read and dissected gas management quite a bit. I had this going for me, as well as the fact that as an engineer, I use numbers and math in my everyday life, so this topic was pretty straight forward to me. I forget that I have these advantages going for me and sometimes can’t figure out why people don’t understand it….I had to work on being patient.

The nice thing about this part of the discussion is that I realized that I don’t need to memorize all the rock bottom values. Given a few parameters and some simple math that I can do in my head, I can quickly come up with rock bottom in cubic feet – and using tank factors, I can convert that to psi for most common tanks. It was really quite liberating to leave the silly spreadsheets in the dust and do it all in my head! J

Day 3

The third day of class included making sure harnesses were set up properly, dry runs of s-drills, and an attempt to show how to do the various kicks. Making sure my harness was configured properly included me putting my undergarments and drysuit on in the non-air conditioned shop (that was probably near 85F!). I was sweating my ass off – we adjusted the height of the chest d-rings, but otherwise it appeared to be set up pretty well. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to get my drysuit off (with maybe the exception of the day I flooded it in low 50 degree water!).

At the end of the class, we all laid down on the ground with our fins on and practiced the various kicks. Honestly, at this point, I came out of the class thinking, “I’m in way over my head! I can’t do any of these properly – this isn’t going to be pretty. They’re probably going to ask me to leave as soon as they see me in the water.” Sigh…

Day 4 – First day of diving

Remember that whole lack of navigational skills topside? Well, it came back to bite me in the ass again. We were meeting at the Marina del Rey Public Boat Launch to get on the Giant Stride. Maciek sent out an email a couple days earlier explaining where it was (though it never said “Public Boat Launch”). Somehow, everyone else figured out where it was, but I ended up at the parking lot with the sportfishing boats and Shanghai Red’s. I called Maciek to figure out where everyone else was (I got to the parking lot at 5:40am – we were supposed to meet by 6:30am, so I called at 6:25 to figure out where everyone was….turns out they were all there and I was the only idiot who managed to get lost – way to look like an idiot, making a good impression already!). Got to the boat launch and it’s $5 to pay; turns out they don’t take debit cards….great, this day is starting off fantastic already *rolls eyes*

Made it out to PV, did the dive brief, splashed, and did our pre-dive checks. This dive was to demonstrate all the propulsion techniques. I did my frog kick, modified frog kick, modified flutter, shuffle (pretty much a modified-modified flutter J), back kick, and helicopter turn.

Second dive was to demonstrate the basic 6. I was surprised that when I was going through the reg skills, my buoyancy was a bit off – I was obviously holding a slightly bigger lung-full than I should have been and ended up floating up 1-2 feet. I usually don’t have issues like this, so I think I was just psyching myself out doing the skills in front of the camera and an instructor. Then to the mask skills….Andy told us on the surface that we would not be flooding and then clearing right away – he would have us breathe a few times and then give us the signal to clear. Dammit, you mean to tell me I’m actually going to have to open my eyes underwater?? Fine, I’ll do it. I generally don’t like to as my eyes sting afterwards, but I decided to “man up” and do it….absolutely no issues, so I think I will be doing this from now on. Surprisingly, my buoyancy didn’t really suffer during the mask skills, and I’m fairly certain it had to do with actually keeping my eyes open and having a reference (even if he was just a big black blob!).

Back to the shop to do video debrief – what a useful tool! I watched my frog kick (pretty decent, still need to work on “slicing” the water without having my fin catch any….it was just slightly), modified frog (too big), modified flutter (which Andy said would be perfect video quality….for a PADI video – damn!), shuffle (looked like a modified flutter should have! At least I have a modified flutter kick….), back kick (actually not too bad – still needs work, but for doing it for the first time, I was pleased), and helicopter turn (uh-oh, needs a lot of work!).

Then on to the basic 6 – no issues with the reg remove/replace, reg exchange, or reg recovery. Mod s-drill was funny to watch though. When we were doing dry runs, I constantly forgot to put my back-up in after I pulled the long hose from behind my head – when doing the mod s-drill in the water, I remembered, but put it in before I had fully extended right arm (I crossed my left arm over the long hose to do it). After realizing my dumb mistake, I will not be doing that again!

Day 5

I made it to the boat launch early again (like always). This time the attendant told me that “they don’t accept $20 bills that early in the morning” – are you freaking joking? I can never please this guy….debit card (nope, we don’t take those), $20 bills (nope we don’t take those)….ugh!

One of the guys from the class didn’t come to the second day of diving, so we now had six people – three girls, three guys. Andy said we were doing guys versus girls – challenge on! For the first dive, we were to appoint a captain who would have each person run through the basic 6. I offered to do it (I’m really working on this short coming of mine). We dropped and start running through the skills. Unfortunately, the visibility was so bad that it was impossible for me to see both of my teammates and have the videographer and Andy see all three of us; eventually Andy took over and we finished them up. I methodically ran through my mod s-drill and it went well (Andy pointed out on the video that that’s what he wants to see – slow is smooth, smooth is fast). Then we did full s-drills with Andy (we donated to him). One of our teammates hit rock bottom, so we thumbed the dive. I still had 2300psi at this point (my other teammate was near rock bottom as well), so Andy and I dropped down and did an s-drill where he donated to me. We did an ascent and he said I nailed it – I was happy with it but still felt it needed some work.

The last dive of the day had us doing a “round robin” of s-drills with our teammates. I donated to one person, then she donated to the next person while I watched (and forgot to sandwich the OOA diver when they were swimming to the exit – dumb mistake!), then the third person donated to me. They went well for the most part, excluding the dumb mistake. Next we shot bags (my first time!). My buoyancy did not suffer at all during the bag shoot, and I was very glad I was being solid in the water….however, after the bag was shot, Andy signaled “question….line?” I bonked myself on the head for forgetting, signaled the direction we needed to go, got back to the line, and tied my spool off (thanks, Jen, for letting me borrow your bag!). Finally, we attempted a toxing diver rescue – all I can say is that if you’re toxing, you’re definitely going to die if I try to rescue you! Actually, after we debriefed, Andy pointed out something that should have been so simple, but I didn’t think of when I was actually attempting it….so I think I might be closer to successful next time (hopefully I never have to do it in real life though).

Back to the shop for video debriefing and individual evaluations. The video debrief was exactly how I expected myself to look – no surprises there (thankfully, toxing diver attempted murder was not caught on video!). The funniest thing I saw on there was Sarah smacking Andy’s hand when he tried to offer some help (on two separate occasions!) – she wanted to do it herself J

Andy and Maciek evaluated each student individually. They asked each student what grade they thought they should get (on a 1 to 5 scale) in various categories. Andy said I was consistently too hard on myself, which is pretty typical of me. They gave me scores they thought were appropriate and we talked about where to go from here.

Conclusions

Altogether, I thought the class was great. I think the video debriefs are absolutely the most valuable tool and I don’t know why more agencies don’t use them. Although this is the start of my “formal” training, I realized that I’ve been training informally for almost a year now, just by diving with like-minded divers, picking their brains, asking for feedback, and trying to emulate them. Andy commented that it was “very obvious” I had been diving with DIR divers – I think they think I’ve gone out on a bunch of practice/skills dives, but Chris can back me up when I say I’ve only done one (two if you count the drysuit practice dive, but that wasn’t specific to this type of diving).

I went in expecting that all of the other students had been doing the same thing as I had been – turns out not many had. Because of that (I think) and because the visibility was a pathetic five feet on the second day, I didn’t feel that team and buddy skills were put to test quite as much as I had expected they would be. As Chris put it a while back, this class should “make you forget you have a buddy, and then make you really wish you had one”. It would have been very fitting if Andy had called me OOA or told me that I lost my mask when I forgot to swim with my team on our s-drill or when I drifted away from them and the line on my bag shoot.

Andy’s major comments/critiques were to get some XL jet fins (in lieu of my Barbie fins), watch my buoyancy when I’m task loaded, continue working on my leadership skills (he called me a “passive leader” which I think is a very fair critique), and to do more than just shore dives (so my goal is to go out on boat dives maybe once a month, if I can swing it financially).

Overall, I was challenged (as was evidenced by the fact that I did end up floating up a foot or two on a number of drills) and I got a lot out of the class. It has really reinforced the fact that I do want to be held to these standards and become a better, safer diver – who eventually dives the Palawan!


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