Advanced Open Water Scuba Diver Training in Ocho Rios October 23, 2008
Posted by Chris Sullivan in Dive Log, Training.Tags: Advanced Diver, Advanced Open Water, AOW, Dive Training, Jamaica, NASDS, Ocho Rios, PADI, Sandals, SCUBA, Scuba Diving
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Feeling the need to treat ourselves, we booked a holiday at Sandals Ocho Rios, a little east of Montego Bay on the North Coast of Jamaica. We found a good deal for a 10 day holiday and travelled there without incident in February 2005.
The resort, as I would expect from Sandals, was lovely, with good accommodation, food and service. Being seasoned travelers, we remembered to book the restaurants early (along with all the other middle aged couples) so we didn’t have to eat in the buffet every night.
This time, I was more enthusiastic about going diving. That might have been because it was included in the price, unlike my visits to Hawaii and Bali, and also that I could walk to dive boat, which is a great convenience. I showed the staff my old NASDS C card, which gave them a chuckle, and they then led me to the pool to check me out. My mission was to don my gear (on dry land this time), do a giant stride entry, and then swim a counter-clockwise circle around the bottom of the pool with neutral buoyancy. I found this no problem and scheduled myself for the afternoon dive – which is generally the shallow dive on resorts, and good for checking out new arrivals.
Deepstop & Instructor
At some point during the first day or two I was asked by staff instructor Richard Badu (a.k.a. “Ghandi”) whether it might not be a good idea for me to take the PADI Advanced Open Water Course. They offered it on the resort and they thought my shiny new card that might get me a little more respect, all for the quite reasonable fee of $200.
Upon my quick acceptance, I was given a book to study (PADI “Adventures in Diving”), and we agreed upon the modules (5 are required) that I would do – these being wreck diving, deep diving, underwater navigation, search & recovery, and night diving. For each of these, one dive was required, which other than the night dive, were on the regularly scheduled boat dives at the resort.
According to my new logbook, acquired just for the course, by my 3rd dive of the trip I was doing my mandatory deep dive to 100 feet. One of the ideas of this dive was (and still is) to check for the presence of narcosis by doing a small problem. Instead of an arithmetic problem I was told just to write my name backwards. It turned out that I wrote it faster at depth than on the surface.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the casual decision to do this course at Sandals was the beginning of a dramatic upturn in training and diving that continues to this day.
Scuba Diving in Bali, Indonesia October 22, 2008
Posted by Chris Sullivan in Dive Log.Tags: Asia, Bali, Drift Diving, Indonesia, Lembongan, Nusa Dua, SCUBA, Scuba Diving, Singapore Airlines
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After accumulating tons of air miles from business trips around the world, my wife and I decided to go to Bali for holiday. Based on all the flying I’d done in 2001 (up to September 11th, when everything stopped), I was top-tier on the Star Alliance and could book any flight on Air Canada, and do fairly well on the other airlines. So we booked a business class passage Air Canada to Los Angeles, then Singapore Airlines from LA to Singapore then on to Bali. If you’ve never had the pleasure of Singapore Airlines business class, I’ve got to say it is one airline where you’re disappointed that the flight is over, even after 12 hours in the air. The food, service, comfort and everything else is simply outstanding.
We’d chosen Bali because of good reports from friends and colleagues about their own vacations. Bali is not only a beautiful place but the people are wonderful. At first, when we were walking around, complete strangers would greet us as they would by. In other places you come to expect a sales pitch or worse to follow. In Bali, people just say hello because they are friendly, and actually want nothing from you. There is the odd exception of course, but so rare as not be a problem.
It was now March 2002, about 4 years after my previous dive. I hadn’t really gone there with the intention of diving, but I did bring my 20 year-old Mares mask (now my backup), but a brochure caught my eye offering an “Adrenaline Dive Tour” from the Bali Hai tour company. So with just a few days left in our 11 day holiday I took a taxi to the dock and boarded a Catamaran for Lembongan Island, a dozen or so miles of the coast from Nusa Dua, where we were staying.
It was March 12, 2002, and the Catamaran was full of tourists for the island, not just divers, so upon our arrival we transferred to a smaller boat for our dive. I was given the usual questionnaire and release form, which among other things asked how long it had been since I had dived. My answer, 4 years, wasn’t noticed. The dive was so named because of the strong current around the island, so we were briefed quite well about what to expect, geared up, and I did a forward roll into the water. This entry seems to have fallen from favour since I quite alarmed the staff by doing so. They asked me if I was OK in the water. Other than having to tighten a few straps which I should have done on the boat I was fine, of course. I’ve only seen one person do this entry since that day, which was the operator of Provost Adventure Divers in the Turks and Caicos.
The dive went without a hitch. The current was indeed strong at about my maximum swimming speed. The fish life was plentiful, and we drifted a long way along the island. We didn’t see any large fish or mammals, just the usual tropical fish, but being my first real drift dive I had a lot of fun. When we got back on the boat they looked at my sheet, saw that I hadn’t dived in 4 years, and told me that they were worried at first but everything was fine.
During the surface interval we got to know each other a bit. One of my fellow divers was a Japanese Kendo Champion who was showing us how to disarm an attacker. I took his picture and he gave me his address to send it to, but I lost my notebook (If you’re reading this, let me know and I’ll send it!).
The second dive was much like the first, and before long we were back on the Catamaran on our way back to the main island. As you can see it was a beautiful day (one of many), with the temperature hitting 29C (84F). I recorded dive times of 50 and 45 minutes, with both dives down to 25 metres. Seems a little too deep for a little too long so I guess we weren’t at the maximum depth for the whole dive.
Seven months to the day afterwards, on October 12, 2002, two bombs exploded in crowded night clubs in Kuta, near the airport, by Jemaah Islamiyah, killing 202 people and injuring hundreds more. I felt sorry not only for the victims of the bombing, who were mostly my fellow Australians (I also have Canadian citizenship and live in Canada, in case this is confusing to you), but also for the gentle Balinese people, who I’m sure suffered greatly from the dropoff in tourism that surely followed. As the island is an oasis of Hinduism in this predominantly Islamic country, the people, many of whom were killed or hurt in the bombings, cannot be associated with this act of violence.
After this, almost 3 years passed until my next dive. This one was the last one recorded in my original log book, registering only as a couple of lines on the last of the notes pages. I now had 69 dives and 40 hours bottom time under my belt, and at the age of 46 thus concluded the first phase of my Scuba diving life, in the 20th year after my open water certification.
Of Deep Shipwrecks and the Environment October 21, 2008
Posted by Chris Sullivan in Ecology.Tags: Al Gore, Climate Change, Diving, Environment, Marjora Carter, Oceans, Robert Ballard, Shipwrecks, Sir Ken Robinson, TED
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Another web site worth checking out is ted.com. TED is an acronym for a conference on Technology, Entertainment and Design. The site contains a series of short (20 minute) presentations by various luminaries on various topics. One of the videos is on the oceans, by Robert Ballard, who is described this way:
“On more than 120 deep-sea expeditions, Robert Ballard has made many major natural discoveries, such as the deep-sea vents. Oh, and he found the Titanic”
If you followed the link above, you found the Wikipedia write-up on Ballard and all the wrecks he’s discovered or otherwise been involved with. You can also find all the videos on iTunes, which is how I get them for ease of download. I haven’t watched the Ballard presentation yet because I’m still loading and watching some of the others.
So far:
- 15 ways to avert a climate crisis – Al Gore
- Do schools kill creativity? – Ken Robinson
- Greening the ghetto – Majora Carter
All are humourous, thought-provoking and at at times inspiring, and I highly recommend them. Thanks to my colleague Rob Notarfonzo for pointing the site out to me.
Scuba Diving in Kauai Hawaii October 20, 2008
Posted by Chris Sullivan in Dive Log.Tags: Hawaii, Kauai, Monk Seal, Poipu, SCUBA, Scuba Diving
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Three years had passed since my last dive in Jamaica. I’d been living in downtown Toronto then moved to a house in the ‘burbs in early 1997. I’d also travelled extensively for my job and not taken advantage of the diving opportunities, so we hadn’t taken any sun holidays.
In 1998 we needed a cheap holiday and with all the air miles I’d built up I booked a return trip for two to Hawaii and an inexpensive hotel on the island of Kauai. We arrived in Honolulu a little after midnight with a connecting flight leaving before 6AM so we didn’t book any accommodation, deciding instead to hang around the airport. Unfortunately, the airport designers had anticipated this and fitted the place out with the most uncomfortable seating possible, concrete benches everyone. So we had a very long 4 hours or so waiting to board for Kauai. The departure lounges were also air-conditioned to the point of pain, and even sitting on a bench outside you felt the icy blast every time the doors opened.
Kauai is in a word rustic. Roosters hang out by the side of the roads, many of which are dirt. Still, it is a beautiful wild place and we enjoyed touring around in a rented car, although our contract explicitly forbade travel on dirt roads. It was April 1998, around the time Pol Pot died, but the trade winds were blowing steadily across the island and lying on the beach was OK but not particularly hot.
I found a decent dive operator who took me on a couple of boat dives. What I remember most is the Turtles. Despite having dived in the Caribbean and Bermuda, I’d never seen a Turtle underwater. They were great – unafraid and swimming all around us. Hawaii has a lot of unique fish, with somewhat comical native names like humuhumunukunuku’āpua’a .
My dive logging was flagging once more, with only a single line entry for Hawaii, without even a day of the month recorded. If you’ve kept up with me so far – thank you – I promise that I’ll have more interesting descriptions of the dives as I catch up with the present, as I’m much more diligent logging dives of late.
We spent a fair bit of time on Poipu Beach. The endangered Hawaiian Monk Seals lounged around on the beach, protected from interference by strict laws. It is a nice beach, with a decent restaurant close by, but the previously mentioned strong winds made the experience less enjoyable than it could have been.
We were there for 10 days, and it was a fitting end to a long Canadian winter
Common Sense Lacking in Caymans? October 19, 2008
Posted by Chris Sullivan in Emergencies.Tags: Boat Diving, Cayman Islands, Caymans, Diving fatality, SCUBA, Scuba Diving, Scuba Fatality
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Reported by CDNN a recent diver fatality of a guy my age in the Caymans quotes a local dive shop operator advocating dive operator profitability over implementation of safety policies, in particular having someone keeping watch on the boat while divers are in the water.
This doesn’t seem to have been a factor in this accident, as staff on board the board provided CPR to the man. It’s hard to say whether this was related to breathing compressed air or the exertion of swimming back to the boat. Another somewhat disturbing observation is that he was pronounced dead at the scene by the paramedics. Unless someone is obviously beyond hope (e.g. decapitated, post rigor-mortis, etc.) in Canada, only physicians may determine death.
A couple of things I take away from this. (1) Fitness is important for older divers. (2) Beware the Caymans. I’ve never been on a dive boat without a lookout, and never want to be either.
Scuba Diving Math – Conversions made easy October 19, 2008
Posted by Chris Sullivan in Miscellany, Training.Tags: Conversions, Dimensional Analysis, SCUBA, Scuba Calculations, Scuba Diving
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This a cool little web page that uses dimensional analysis to do unit conversions. You can just enter any amount of any unit it supports (which are many), and the units you’d like to convert them to, and as long as they’re compatible, it will figure it out.
For instance, if you enter atmosphere, and the result unit as pound/inch^2 (you can also enter psi, it knows that one), it will give you 14.696, which is the atmospheric pressure in pounds per square inch.
It also knows a lot of constants, like dens_sea_water, which with the result unit as pound/foot^3 (pounds per cubic foot) will give you 63.9887 (like the 64 pounds per cubic foot you learn in scuba class).
Some things it does I don’t understand, like entering atmosphere/(63.9887 pound/foot^3) with the result unit as feet, gives the correct answer as 33.0718 feet. This is the derivation of the 33 feet depth of sea water (33FSW) for every additional atmosphere of pressure underwater. You simply take the pressure of the atmosphere and divide it by the density of sea water, specifying feet as the result unit, and the program worries about the tedious job of converting the units. You can also say meters, and it will give back 10.0803, if you prefer metric. However, using atmosphere/dens_sea_water results in an error. Maybe I’m missing something.
Something it does that’s pretty amazing is that you don’t even have to enter the / sign to make the thing work. All you do is put in atmosphere;(63.9887 pound/foot^3) and whatever unit of length you like in the result field, and it figures out what to do based on the units.
Anyway a fun tool to apply to Scuba calculations. It looks like the company that makes it isn’t doing very much. All they’re selling is a Palm OS version of the software.
Scuba Diving Ocho Rios October 18, 2008
Posted by Chris Sullivan in Dive Log.Tags: Ciboney, Jamaica, Ocho Rios, SCUBA, Scuba Diving, Shipwreck
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Our next trip was back to Jamaica to a resort which at the time was called Ciboney. We’d found a good deal on a two-week trip including unlimited diving to the resort located in Ocho Rios on the North Coast of Jamaica, about an hour from Montego Bay. Once again we were blessed with perfect weather, although the beach was not a patch on Negril.
At one point on the trip the resort tried to tell me that Scuba was no longer included in the price. Fortunately, my wife had brought along the brochure and we were able to show them that it was. That was something to remember for future trips.
There was not a lot to commend the diving, and although my log book was more detailed than my trips to Cuba, with at least dates, times and depths, not much else was recorded. There’s not a lot of fish to be seen in Jamaican diving, probably because most of them have been eaten.
Aside from unnamed reef dives, there was one place called “Ciboney Island” (a made-up name if I’ve ever heard one), where I dived one dive with buddy Jan and another with Steve, ranging from 30 to 60 feet in depth. The deepest dive was the top of an undersea mountain they called “Devil’s Island”, with depths from 80 to 100 feet. On March 4th and 14th of 1995 (the day Norman Thagard became the first American astronaut to be launched in a Russian spacecraft) we went to a wreck called the Katherine (not a made up name, apparently). On the second dive I noticed the resident small fish nibbling at my fins, and the occasionally attacking me in other spots. They had spawned on the ship and were defending their eggs the best they could, which given their size, wasn’t very well. Fortunately for them I had no interest in fish eggs.
It was a lovely vacation. After dinner we’d go to a beautiful wood-paneled bar for Grand Marnier. Besides the diving, we borrowed a Hobie Cat and sailed around a bit. One of those time we had to be rescued because the staff had rigged the rudder wrong and it was ineffective. I had to jump in the water to keep the boat from smashing into the reef which poked through the surface near the beach.
What Next for Dive Training? October 18, 2008
Posted by Chris Sullivan in Training.Tags: Dive Training, DSAT, Gas Blender, Hal Watts, Jodrey, NAUI, PADI, PSAI, Rebreathers, SCUBA, Scuba Diving, Scuba Instructor, Scuba Training, Technical Training, Technical Wreck Diving, Trimix
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I went on a training binge last year, completing my Divemaster (actually completed in March, but close enough), DSAT Tec Deep Training, Wreck Diving Speciality (it was a great course, with a couple of extra dives tagged on the end, which I’ll describe in a future post), Drift Diving Speciality, and Night Diving Specialty. This qualifies me to be a “Master Scuba Diver” in PADI terms but I don’t have a compelling reason to spend the thirty bucks for the card. It’s not like it gets me anything, although PADI says it puts me in a class of distinction.
But now I’m faced with the question of what to do next. It gets harder from here. My local dive shop can offer me (a) more specialities, although I think I’ve done all the ones I really want to do, (b) Gas Blender – might do that over the winter, but I already understand the principles of partial pressure mixing, or (c) Assistant Instructor, which I’ll probably do also if I can fit into my schedule, and it looks like my dive shop is going to offer it soon.
After that I’m done with my local shop, and there’s several options.
- Instructor. Getting on in years with a busy full-time job and a blog to write I don’t know whether I want to do it. I like helping out in classes and so on, and it’s fun helping people learn to dive, but I wonder if it’s too late to get much value out of it. Then again, there are people much older than me who have qualified, including one guy at 70 who’s featured in the Undersea Journal. Assistant Instructors are allowed to do some teaching so I suppose I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve tried it a bit.
- Trimix. Let’s me go deeper and remember what I saw. Could be a lot of fun and useful even fairly close to home. The Jodrey, for instance, is barely doable on air, starting at about 140′ and going down to 240. In the darkness and current narcosis is all the more apparent. However, the cost of Helium is climbing as the world is running out of it, and $100 for a 20 minute dive is starting to get up there. NAUI seems to have a good program – and I find it interesting that being a non-smoker is a prerequisite, at least at one training facility.
- More Technical Courses. PSAI (run by Hal Watts) runs some interesting courses, including one that dives air down to 240 feet under close supervision to really come to terms with Narcosis, while at the same time helping you perfect your deep diving technique. Sounds extreme but I like the idea of training well past the limits I’d actually consider diving outside a training environment. Technical Wreck diving is another one I’d consider. Deep wreck diving is probably more dangerous than cave diving, but my wife has developed a healthy fear of me going into caves diving but doesn’t have the same perception of wrecks.
- Rebreathers. Not ready for them, or more to the point, I don’t think they’re ready for me yet. There have been too many accidents with them for my liking, and the discipline required to use them is beyond what I’m prepared to take on for the moment. If I started getting involved with diving below 75 metres or so, I’d consider changing my mind, as I think there’s a safety crossover point down there somewhere between rebreathers and open circuit Scuba.
I can’t think of much else. The other option is forget more training and just go diving. We’ll see.
Scuba Diving in Santiago De Cuba October 17, 2008
Posted by Chris Sullivan in Dive Log.Tags: Bat Cave, Bats, Cuba, Diving, Santiago De Cuba, Scuba Diving
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This area of Cuba is on the South Coast on the eastern end of the island, almost as far away from Havana as you can get. It was still the days of really cheap holidays in Cuba (they’re still cheaper than other places), and that’s what we were looking for, so we booked at the Delta Sierra Mar (a Canadian hotel chain). The resort was lovely, the beach OK but not a patch on Varadero, and the food was good but monotonous. At least the dive boat worked.
The first dive was led by a young woman. I didn’t have my own gear at the time except the mask and snorkel I’d brought along, and I was given reasonably up-to-date gear except I had no Octo or depth gauge. Lacking the former, I thought, would be someone else’s problem, and the depth gauge wasn’t all that necessary as I was just sticking with the group.
Without so much as a briefing on hand signals, she said “everybody ready?”, and when we said yes, she just backrolled into the water. We all followed her down, down, and down some more. I was thinking that we’d been descending for quite a while and swam up behind another diver to check her depth gauge. It read 130 feet. After a couple of minutes she signaled everyone to go up and we returned to the boat. She’d missed the reef. Quite a surprise she’d take an untested group of divers that deep without so much as a briefing, but that’s Cuba, and that was my deepest dive to date and remained so for a dozen more years.
The rest of the diving was unmemorable, and all the more so as I’d reached a new low in my dive logging, merely writing down “Santiago De Cuba, 7 dives” in my log book – and I’m not sure of the date, although I think it was around March, 1994. However, one of the surface intervals was quite the thing. We were asked if we’d like to visit the “bat cave”. So we snorkeled from the boat to the shore and through a half submerged opening into a small cave. There was the odd bat flying around but nothing exciting. We were then directed through another opening into a larger cave. Once our eyes became used to the darkness we saw the bats, all hanging from the ceiling shoulder-to-shoulder. There must have been tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of them. I’ve never seen anything like it. Through another entrance we could see another cave that accessed the shore. This apparently was a favourite secluded spot for youthful romance. Just the two of us and the bats.
On one of the dives my sunglasses fell off while I was unloading from the boat, moored about 100 feet from the shore. On the last day, being unable to dive due to the upcoming flight, I spent two hours with snorkel, mask and fins searching before I finally found them. During the time the dive boat pulled up, anchored, and proceeded to pump its oily bilge, fouling the area in which I was swimming. I realised that they had much to learn about environmental protection.
Scuba Diving Course Online October 16, 2008
Posted by Chris Sullivan in Training.Tags: Diving, MIT, NAUI, Open Water Course, SCUBA, Scuba Diving, Scuba Training, Training
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The Massachussets Institute of Techology has an amazing collection of 1800 online university courses. Not only are many of these available with dowloadable video, but being one of the top schools in the world, many are of excellent quality and extremely well presented.
Their physical education department runs a course in Scuba Diving, based on the NAUI and SSI Open Water Course, but he states up front that he will teach well beyond the normal open water curriculum. You can access these on line , including the video, at MIT’s Open Courseware web site.
The course includes:
- Introduction to Scuba
- Physics of Diving
- Physics of Diving, cont’d
- Care & Planning in Scuba (no video for this one for some reason)
- Beyond Diving, advanced topics
- The Ocean Environment
- Exam Review (no video)
There are also individual videos for skill demonstrations available for download. You can also stream the video if you don’t want to store it all. There is no charge for accessing these materials (and of course no credit for taking the courses), but they solicit donations.
The course instructor is Halston Taylor, a cross-country coach at MIT. What I’ve seen so far isn’t up to the level of say, the Physics course I’ve been watching, but for the price it’s hard to beat. He really emphasises general fitness for divers.
I could spend the rest of my life on just this one web site. It really shows the positive impact the Internet is having on our world, and the enormous potential for the future.
Chronicle of an older diver 