Diving done, forms sent off

We passed our Advanced Open Water PADI class on Sunday.

That feels pretty good. We each had an issue or two during the training and both managed to work through the stress or problem. Heck, that's what training is for. Or as I like to say, Scuba training is all the ways you can die that you'll almost never run into in real life. But now you know how to handle them. I even had to assist a beginning diver with an out of air emergency. It actually surprised me. This young fella cruises up next to me at the 15 foot safety stop and signals that he's "out of air". It took me a heartbeat or two to figure out that he was out of air and wasn't fucking with me. So I shared air, finished the safety stop then ascended to the surface with the PADI handshake. (link left arms so the out of air person doesn't lose the air hose going up). At the top I asked him if he was really out of air. He showed me his pressure gauge, which was buried at Zero.

Two things you NEVER do in Scuba. You never hold your breath (lungs can explode from pressure changes) and you NEVER NEVER NEVER run out of air.

Wacko.

The last day became interesting because our class had 14 Open Water students, and we two Advanced Open Water Students. Plus the 2 Dive Masters. The interesting part happened because at Blue Hole they have a compressor to refill the used tanks from the Saturday dive.

It was broken.

So we had to go through all the tanks to find the ones with a decent amount of air left for whatever skills we needed to do. One of those skills was the deep dive which takes a fair amount of air due to the depth and pressure. That probably led to the young fella having problems as much as anything. On Sunday Crystal and I did some Buoyancy work, the deep dive, and the mask skills for our full face masks. We did fine with all of that.

Of course, that's partly because Crys did the deep dive kind of accidentally on Saturday night during the night dive. :D . It's easy to get disoriented on a night dive, and when her suit lost buoyancy and the depth increased a bit she ended up on the bottom for a minute or two. She handled it perfectly. Her response was thoughtful, measured and appropriate. I freaked out a little when I checked on my "buddy" and she'd dropped like a rock. :D It all turned out well. I ended up putting a little too much pressure on my ears in my hurry to get down to her since I wasn't sure how much air she had. That turned out fine as well.

We also ran through the classroom part of the enhanced air module. They'll mail us the test and then we'll be able to use Nitrox/EAN with higher oxygen contents to dive longer and more comfortably.

The full face masks worked out well though it took us both a good bit of the diving weekend to get them tuned to our faces and get used to using them. My other odd thing was getting used to the new BCD (the vest that has an air bladder, holds your tank, weights and everything else. Twice I dropped half my weights to the bottom of the damned pool and our instructor (Rex) had to retrieve them. That was a bit embarrassing.

Rex, by the way, was fantastic to work with. He was kind, patient, considerate and worked with our low experience levels to help us succeed. Good dude.