TDI Normoxic Trimix, Portland

[Tricky]

Rob Dobson, tootricky and myself are doing the TDI Normoxic Trimix course with Mark Powell this weekend. Here's day one's report.

tootricky and I arrived at the Aqua Hotel around 8.30 on Friday evening. Rob was staying at the Portland Lodge with Mark so, as we needed to put a plan together for the first dive, he came down and we talked and planned over dinner.

Dive one was the Aeolian Sky, a greek freighter that sank in the 80s. We'd planned a bottom time of 40 minutes as this gave us a 60 minute runtime. The gas we were carrying meant we could have dived for longer, but we decided not to. The purpose of the dive was to give Mark a chance to see how we dived together as a team. Some valve and OOG drills were thrown in, but other than that, the dive was fairly routine. My positioning was pretty poor - I was number two and should have been closer to tootricky who was number one. Also my torch communication wasn't that great and tootricky had problems knowing if I was behind him without turning to look. We left the bottom early as Rob was feeling the cold and after a slower than planned ascent, we hit the surface at the time we had planned had we completed the full bottom time. Other than that, the dive went well and I think Mark was please with how things went.

Dive two was on the Dredger and was going to be all skills and drills. We descended and almost immediately went in to valve drills. These were followed with mask remove/replace. I have had problems with mask off stuff but was able to whip my mask off and replace it with barely any stress as did Rob and tootricky. We then did some trim work, trying to get horizontal (and stay horizontal) without moving hands or feet. Another valve drill was thrown in for good measure. Next up was eyes-closed OOG drills. This meant two of us, opposite each at either end of a length of rail on the wreck. One of was would go out of air, but we had to find each other along the rail, indicate the problem and obtain a gas source with our eyes closed - i.e. by touch alone. It was a very weird sensation.

More mask off work followed, with stage removal, line swim, valve drill and stage replace while the mask was off. Again I was apprehensive given my dislike of mask off work. Fortunately I was able to manage it, and I think I may have got over my fear of taking my mask off. Mark was a little sneaky with the stage replace and placed his stage on the line before mine. The idea was to see if I would be fooled in to thinking it was mine and clip it on. Needless to say I was fooled - When I put my mask was put back on I was carrying a 7l instead of the Al80 I had gone in with. It did mean that I got to do a stage hand off though, so I guess it's not too much of a problem. Rob and tootricky weren't taken in by this and managed to retrieve the correct stages, although both had done this before on the Deco Procedures course while I hadn't. To finish the dive, we did a 6 minute ascent from 6m which went very well. Rob and I were a little low on gas by this point so threw in a gas switch for good measure. We haven't yet had the debrief for dive two, but the general feeling was that it went well.

Tomorrow we will start with the Unknown Coaster (a skills dive), followed by the Binnendijk (sp?) which will probably be more like dive one today - assessing our teamwork and ascent time, but with some drills as well. The weather down here was fantastic, with almost mill pond conditions, and bright sunshine which, of course, only added to our enjoyment of the day. Thanks should go to Skipper for doing a cracking job for us on Top Gun. It was also good to meet SoggyFox and Smudger who also did the Sky with us and Brick, who was introduced to us by Mark between dives. We also ran in to jb2cool (would have been hard to miss him, he was diving off Top Gun when we did the dredger) who was down with his girlfriend and a couple of mates.

Updates will follow tomorrow if I have time to write/post them.

[GLOC]

Good luck with the course, I know Mark can be inventive from past experience....like the KT reel which was locked off as he hit me with a valve drill, funny that the reel managed to unlock itself and swim around my fins and land back on the platform and lock itself back up again

Pass on my regards to Rob...tell him his order from dir-shop.cz will be with him next week sometime and I will see him next Sunday (hopefully).

[wilbo]

Originally Posted by GLOC

Good luck with the course, I know Mark can be inventive from past experience....like the KT reel which was locked off as he hit me with a valve drill, funny that the reel managed to unlock itself and swim around my fins and land back on the platform and lock itself back up again

Pass on my regards to Rob...tell him his order from dir-shop.cz will be with him next week sometime and I will see him next Sunday (hopefully).

really bizarre that Gareth - the reel I was using yesterday did exactly the same thing.. unlocked itself while doing a shutdown.. quite bizarre.

He is a very good instructor though..

Tricky - all the best for the course and please pass on "4 divers" best regards..

ps. Gareth - did I mention we had 25 meters of viz (>30metres depth) in the NDAC yesterday.. quite fantastic..

[Tricky]

Day two started grey and wet - I was disappointed by this at first, but it actually worked out quite well as the sea was still pretty calm and we weren't sweating under the sun in our drysuits. Dive one was the Unknown Coaster, although I think we skipped this and went in on the Spaniard. The dive started off badly for me, I struggled with a valve drill and my buoyancy was all over the shop. Fortuately it finished quite well - we did toxing diver lifts which all three of us were able to perform to Mark's satisfaction.

Dive two was the Binnendijk (the Benny) and was going to be more drills, etc. Mark had said he would be timing our valve drills as he felt we weren't doing them fast enough. Having struggled with the valve drill earlier in the day I was slightly concerned by this. We would also, as a team, be managing a maskless ascent. The dive started well with Rob and tootricky performing their valve drills as expected. My turn came around and I had no problems reaching my valves and they were turning easily too. Great, I thought, good job Mark is timing this one and not the one from the morning. Right post and manifold closed and opened, then on to the left post, breathe down reg and replace with primary - shit, no gas I turn to Rob, give him the OOG signal and duly receive gas. I check my valves and, as the situation suggested, I hadn't opened my right post after all (we had thought Mark had something to do with this, but it was actually all my fault). I've only ever read about that happening so it was a something of a shock when it happened to me. Anyway, I reset my valves and performed the next valve drill without incident. At this point Rob got a little confused and did an extra valve drill as he thought he'd heard Mark simulating bubbles from one of his valves. The dive was drawing to a close when Mark indicated that he wanted my mask. Having done the mask off drills the day before I was feeling confident so whipped off my mask and passed it off. tootricky took hold of me and guided me to a piece of wreck that I was to hold on to while the blob was deployed. I took this moment to get my breathing under control and ready for the ascent. At this point my mask-off demon came back to bite me. Despite knowing I should be able to do it, I struggled with my breathing, and found myself fighting a rising panic. The surface was firmly in my mind but, without a mask and at 28m, I firmly dismissed it. I had a spare mask so started to reach for it - I kept thinking "shit, I've knackered this for the others" but I knew I was only just keeping it together. Mark noticed my agitation and passed my mask back - I now had one hand clutching the wreck and the other clutching my mask which made it rather difficult to replace the mask as I felt I needed two hands to do this. In the end I sort of hugged the wreck with my elbows and managed to replace and clear the mask.

With the situation resolved I noticed that Rob and tootricky were sharing air - something Mark had thrown at them while my mask was off. The blob was up though, so we started the ascent. Rob and tootricky almost missed the gas switch at 21m, assuming they were to do the gas share all the way to the surface, but I signalled the switch and everyone went back to their own gas supply. At 6m Mark once again asked for my mask and, despite the earlier problems, I handed this off and remained calm. We then ascended from 6m at 1m/minute with tootricky using touch to indicate when to hold and when to continue the ascent.

So that was day two almost complete. The biggest thing I learnt was that I should always carry a backup mask, and be able to get to it when necessary. I suspect that with practice I can sort out the mask-off issues though, so it's something that's going on my list of stuff to do over the winter. We finished off the day with some deco theory and planning for the dive the next day.

[Tricky]

Day three started pretty much like day two, although we were out a little later so managed a lie in. The weather was pretty much the same, but again we were happy with that. Today we would be doing our first trimix dive - on the Iolanthe. With Mark adamant that the sea bed would be no more than 40m, we planned accordingly, although we were a little conservative with the mix at 25/25 (yes, not a GUE standard gas, but we were happy with our choice). Once analysed, we found we actually had 25/30 but it didn't affect our plan, and the shallower END was a bonus. We would be doing only the one dive today and Mark would be using it to assess our teamwork and ability to follow the plan. Teamwork had been an issue for us eariler in the course, with tootricky and I diving in a manner different to what Rob was used to, but things were improving.

The Iolanthe is a shortish cruise out from Castletown so it wasn't long after ropes off that we reached the dive site. We were a little early for slack though, so found ourselves sitting around waiting for a bit. The dive itself went very well, although we could have planned for a little deeper - it's certainly a wreck I'd like to go back and do under normal circumstances. Our plan had been to deploy the blob at 21m but after parting company with Rob the night before, tootricky and I decided that it would be easier to do it from the bottom instead. Unfortunately we forgot to mention it to Rob which caused a little confusion when we came to start the ascent, although it was quickly resolved. The ascent, including a switch to 50% at 21m, went faultlessly and we hit the surface bang on the 50min planned run time. I'm happy to say that our teamwork was also spot on with the three of us keeping a close V formation for the entire dive.

More deco theory and planning followed, and also the mandatory visit to UE to buy shiny kit.

[SoggyFox]

Originally Posted by Tricky

At this point my mask-off demon came back to bite me. Despite knowing I should be able to do it, I struggled with my breathing, and found myself fighting a rising panic. The surface was firmly in my mind but, without a mask and at 28m, I firmly dismissed it. I had a spare mask so started to reach for it - I kept thinking "shit, I've knackered this for the others" but I knew I was only just keeping it together. Mark noticed my agitation and passed my mask back - I now had one hand clutching the wreck and the other clutching my mask which made it rather difficult to replace the mask as I felt I needed two hands to do this. In the end I sort of hugged the wreck with my elbows and managed to replace and clear the mask.
.

your not the only one.

glad to hear it all went ok.

[warmwaterdiver]

Well done so far to all

Just make sure your buddy catches your stage when you let go, I had a "right one" on my course who missed it and tried to blame me

Has any of your kit started "disappearing" yet?

[Tricky]

Day four, the final day, was again going to be just a single dive. We would be doing the Buccaneer, with the seabed expected to be at 45m. With it being cheaper to get a remix instead of a full trimix fill, we again decided on 25/30. Having got 5% extra He the day before, I wasn't surprised to find we actually got 25/35. Luckily, again, this didn't affect our plan. Mark seemed happy with the way things had gone so far, but said he wanted to try to deal with multiple failures (as if we hadn't done that enough already ) so we spent a lot of time trying to second guess what he might do to us.

After a longish cruise to the site (relative to the previous dives) we were in the water. The bubble check at 6m found a small leak from the neck of my 50% bottle meant a quick trip back to the surface for a discussion of what to do. We decided that the leak was small enough to not be a problem so we descended again. Our plan for 45m was spot on and we managed to swim from the stern to the bow and back well within our 20 min planned bottom time. I was to blob up again but found my smb & reel were missing, Nic was the backup for this but Mark also relieved him of his smb & reel. As Rob was deploying his smb, he was hit with a wing inflator failure. With his drysuit hose disconnecte to inflate the blob, he was without buoyancy - Mark took this as an opportunity to see what would happen if Rob sank a bit so pretty much climbed on his back to push him down (ok, that's a bit of an exaggeration). I could see Rob sinking so grabbed him arm to keep him at my level.

Despite the delay we managed to hit our plan spot on and completed our deco at the right time, but we still weren't safe from the marauding instructor. Due to the bubbling stage, Mark felt I should be hit with lost deco gas. His plan was to just turn off my deco bottle and see what I would do. I spotted this so was preapred for it, but the reg kept breathing. I assumed Mark had turned it back on without me noticing, but it turns out that the valve on that particular bottle needs a little turn past where it feels closed to actually close it completely. Foiled at the first attempted, wetnotes were waved in front of me indicating that I'd lost my deco gas. I swapped to back gas then indicated to the others what had happened. Mark's notes said I'd run out of deco gas three minutes before the end of the stop so tootricky went to backgas and I did the remaining three minutes of my deco breathing from his stage (which was still clipped to him). We also executed a perfect 1m/minute ascent while still sharing gas.

So Mark had tried his best but had been unable to get us to deviate from our plan, with our teamwork and training getting us through all the problems presented to us. We still had the 'exam' to do, but Mark told us that we'd all passed the diving side of the course - Rob seemed a little disappointed that we'd passed first time, but we were all pleased to have earnt the qualification in the alloted time.

Thanks go to Mark for a fun and challenging course, Dave (Skipper) and Andy for top notch skippering on Top Gun and Goose, Breakwater for keeping us fed, watered and "in gas", and to Rob for being a great buddy. I'm happy to have completed the course while being able to do some proper diving, it will be good to know that I won't need to do any more training for a while as the course means I'm qualified to 60m (somewhere I have no plans to go to just yet).

[Tricky]

I forgot to mention that my primary torch failed on the descent on day three. I swapped to my backup, a Photon Torpedo, which would have been adequate, but Rob offered me his PT with LED upgrade and it was brilliant - more than suitable for the conditions we had on the bottom.

[Tricky]

Originally Posted by SoggyFox

your not the only one.

glad to hear it all went ok.

Thanks. I was glad to be able to keep it together enough to not bolt for the surface this time like I did on Fundies (only from 4m though).

Originally Posted by warmwaterdiver

Has any of your kit started "disappearing" yet?

I think I was lucky to get away with only losing my mask a couple of times, my smb & reel once and my deco gas once