[warmwaterdiver]

Day One

Got out to the car, put key in ignition, engine management light came on. ‘Fcuk!’. Luckily my parents were overseas so I drove over and picked their car up. Transferring the gear, fuelling up and then on the road 45 minutes late. Half way to Plymouth I realised my fathers car hasn’t got satnav, ‘ah that could be a problem!’. Well I kind of knew where Richs place was so I was hopeful I could find it. Rolling up 30 minutes late after calling Rich and letting him know the situation, I found his new unit roughly where I thought it was. Less of a problem as I found out, as one of the other students was still missing as he had driven to Richs old unit at Mountbatten, so there was no rush after all.

We had a quick look at the units before going upstairs to the classroom area for Rich to introduce us. There were three trainees on the course, Terry, Wade and myself. Now, looking at the other two, I was definitely putting myself as number three in the league. Both the other two looked confident and I was literally shitting bricks. A quick pep-talk by Rich about the history of himself, Deep Blue, and CCRs, then onto the course outline.

Back down to the workshop to strip the unit and have a good look at them. Rich was being assisted by Mike Potts, who was not only Richs safety diver but a very experienced CCR diver as well. I was on an Inspo Vision (as I liked the look of the electronics), Wade a Classic and Terry a Meg. Mike showed us how to strip the units down to their component parts and reassemble them, careful to remember the O rings in various important places! We went through the electronics and menus, then actually putting the units on and pre-breathing them. From the basics of being shown how to adjust the harness, manually add dil and O2, the manual pull dump on the loop, mouthpiece opening and closing, positive and negative pressure checks, loop clears, etc, etc.

Time to pack them into the back on Richs van and drive over to the pool. We used the pool at ‘Sea and Sea’ and very nice it was too, cheers lads! Carrying the gear in, it hit me that I was actually going to dive a CCR!

Now, its been 3 years since diving in the Red Sea and couldn’t find my wetsuit at home, so decided to just wear an old t-shirt and pair of shorts. Getting into the water was lovely, it was heated to swimming pool levels, so I was happy, whereas the other two were in rashsuits and wetsuits. Another very surprising thing we found out was that Rich and Mike weren’t actually going to get wet. Rich uses a comms set with underwater earpieces (mask strap mounted) to communicate his instructions to us, whilst Mike used a underwater video camera to record us and generally watch over us, ready to jump in should we need assistance. The pool has three levels, so we started at the shallow end, just going underwater and getting used to the units. Then, progressing to moving down and actually trying to swim the unit. We were soon in the deep end and during the following two and a half hours, we were swimming around trying to get neutrally buoyant and completing the basic three drills.

1. bailout
2. manual dil flush
3. boom scenario

I was having trouble already, the mouthpiece swivel is fairly tight and although I could manage it in the pool, I knew I would struggle with 5mm gloves on. The time seemed to fly by and soon Rich was telling us we had the last 15 minutes on our own in the pool to get confident and enjoy ourselves. But not for long, as no surprise he started on adhoc drills as soon as we left the bottom for a swim, but no dramas occurred and we all managed fine.

One thing that did surprise me, as I hadn’t given it much prior thought, with OC if you turn all your gas off you can’t breathe, but with CC you can turn it all off and you can still breathe, for a while anyway!

Units out and we went back to Richs unit for a debrief.

I was stopping over down there so had a nice warm local B&B to go back too. Some food and another early night.