We did the coolest exercise as part of the Dive Master course today – equipment exchange while buddy breathing. What is means precisely is you have to swap all your gear (fins, booties, BCDs, masks) underwater while sharing the same regulator, which in turn means that you make 2 breaths through the regulator and then give it to your buddy and while they are breathing, you are just exhaling for their 2 breaths, and so on. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here is one - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPNF4OsAMME&feature=related. Liang and I, of course, didn't do it wearing just bathing suits like the guys in the video; it was more like 15,000 mm of neoprene and hence 15,000 pounds of weight to make sure you don't float up when removing your BCD.
I loved it! Of course, you would never do anything like this on a real dive. So why include it in the training? Well, because this is exactly what diving is about – being in total control while multi-tasking. And if you do it well (which I did, yay!), you feel super-accomplished. It was a lot of fun, too!
The additional bonus of the day was a totally unexpected night dive. I actually got to go on the boat as a Dive Master candidate, so I had to assemble people's gear, distribute weights, etc. And to have dinner with those clients afterwards. Work, in other words. It was pretty awesome to participate in diving from "the other side". And it was equally awesome not to have to pay for this dive.
No comments:
Post a Comment